Older Breast Cancer Patients Missing Out on Fair Treatment

Research shows older patients are significantly less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy despite treatment improvements over the last ten years.

Breakthrough Breast Cancer has uncovered alarming variations in care for breast cancer patients depending on their age and is launching the Every Chance campaign to highlight this issue. The charity says that this discrimination must stop. Risk of breast cancer increases with age and fair treatment must be available to all.

The charity will be collecting evidence from older patients and their relatives across the country to ensure all barriers to treatments that will benefit them are removed and lives saved.

Recent research funded by Breakthrough and others shows that some older patients are not benefitting from the advances in radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery over the last ten years that have dramatically improved the survival chances of younger patients:

• Breast cancer patients aged over 80 are 40 times less likely to receive surgery than younger patients
• Where surgery does take place older women are significantly less likely to receive breast conserving surgery
• Older women are significantly less likely to receive standard treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy than younger women

Breakthrough’s Every Chance campaign is calling for treatment to be based on clinical need rather than age and seeks to open the debate around the issue of age equality. We are campaigning to ensure that regardless of age, all breast cancer patients have every chance:

• to access the treatments and care that will benefit them
• to access appropriate clinical trials
• to make informed choices about their treatment

And that all women over 70 and who are no longer routinely invited to breast screening have every chance to access this vital life-saving service.

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