Trends in socioeconomic inequalities in the incidence of ovarian cancer among women in Canada: 1992–2010

ABSTRACT

Ovarian cancer is the seventh most common cancer among women worldwide. We assessed the effect of socioeconomic status on ovarian cancer incidence in Canada between 1992 and 2010. We linked data from the Canadian Cancer Registry (CCR), Canadian Census of Population (CCP), and National Household Survey (NHS) to measure socioeconomic inequalities in the incidence of ovarian cancer among Canadian women over the study period. The age-standardized relative and absolute concentration index (RC and AC, respectively) were calculated to quantify income- and education-related inequalities in the incidence of ovarian cancer in Canadian women during this period. Despite a slight increase in the crude incidence of ovarian cancer in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador & Prince Edward Island, and Canada as a whole, the incidence of ovarian cancer in Canada has mostly remained stable, between 13 and 15 new cases per 100,000 per year between 1992 and 2010. The estimated age-standardized RC and AC values for the study period did not indicate any statistically significant relationship between income or education status, and the incidence of ovarian cancer in Canada. Future work should be directed at seeking related risk factors other than socioeconomic status that may contribute to the incidence of this disease.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• inequalities
• ovarian cancer
• socioeconomic status
• trends

Acknowledgments

We conducted the analyses at the Statistics Canada’s Atlantic Research Data Centre (ARDC) at Dalhousie University. The ARDC is part of the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN). The authors would like to thank the CRDCN for facilitating the access to the CCR, CCP and the NHS and the ARDC analysts Theresa Kim and Yasmine Amirkhalkhali for their assistance and support. We also thank Min Hu for his research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

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Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible through the financial support of the Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation (DMRF) Dean & Evelyn Salsman Studentship for Cancer Research, as well as a Research Development Grant awarded by the Faculty of Health at Dalhousie University.