Trends in the Netherland’s breast cancer recurrence rates between 2003 and 2011

• Applicant: Dr. Vinzenz Völkel
• Subject Area: Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 417891978

Breast cancer is the most frequent malignant tumor within the female population worldwide. Due to very effective therapy concepts the survival rates of patients with mamma-carcinoma have been increasing during the past years. People who managed to survive their diagnosis in the first place though dread tumor recurrence ever after.Some years ago, scientists of the Dutch university of Twente initiated the "influence-project" and developed a prognostic model estimating a patient’s individual risk to suffer from tumor recurrence. However, this easy-to-handle tool considers details on applied therapy measures only rudimentarily. During the last decade, many new individual therapy concepts were established. As a consequence, there exist countless possible combinations of patient characteristics and therapy options. To identify very favorable or particularly adverse patient-therapy-combinations, big-data-analysis is required.Data for this project will be provided by the Netherland’s cancer registry NCR. Since 1989 it collects information on all Dutch patients with malignant diagnoses. Therefore, our neighbor country offers ideal conditions to conduct health services research on a high level. For the purpose of this study, over 63,000 patients with an invasive mamma-carcinoma between 2003 and 2011 and a follow-up period of more than five years will be considered.Of course, randomized controlled trials are gold-standard to analyze the impact of new therapies. Nevertheless, registry research provides truly objective conditions for examining oncologic outcomes after the implementation of new therapies in daily clinical practice. The results of this study thus hopefully will support the development of more customized therapy and surveillance concepts.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Host: Professorin Dr. Sabine Siesling