Urban Rural Differences in Breast Cancer in New Zealand

Ross Lawrenson, Chunhuan Lao, Mark Elwood, Charis Brown, Diana Sarfati and Ian Campbell
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Ross Lawrenson: National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis, The University of Waikato, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand
Chunhuan Lao: National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis, The University of Waikato, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand
Mark Elwood: School of Population Health, The University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand
Charis Brown: National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis, The University of Waikato, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand
Diana Sarfati: Department of Public Health, The University of Otago, Wellington 6021, New Zealand
Ian Campbell: School of Medicine, The University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand

IJERPH, 2016, vol. 13, issue 10, 1-7

Abstract: Many rural communities have poor access to health services due to a combination of distance from specialist services and a relative shortage of general practitioners. Our aims were to compare the characteristics of urban and rural women with breast cancer in New Zealand, to assess breast cancer-specific and all-cause survival using the Kaplan–Meier method and Cox proportional hazards model, and to assess whether the impact of rurality is different for M?ori and New Zealand (NZ) European women. We found that rural women tended to be older and were more likely to be M?ori. Overall there were no differences between urban and rural women with regards their survival. Rural M?ori tended to be older, more likely to be diagnosed with metastatic disease and less likely to be screen detected than urban M?ori. Rural M?ori women had inferior breast cancer-specific survival and all-cause survival at 10 years at 72.1% and 55.8% compared to 77.9% and 64.9% for urban M?ori. The study shows that rather than being concerned that more needs to be done for rural women in general it is rural M?ori women where we need to make extra efforts to ensure early stage at diagnosis and optimum treatment.

Keywords: rural; urban; breast cancer; M?ori; equity; survival (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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