Men were more likely than women to receive a late-stage diagnosis for 16 cancer sites between 2015 and 2022, according to a study published July 1 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
Researchers from the National Cancer Institute analyzed 2,401,772 cancer cases between 2015 and 2022 from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database to identify any association between sex and stage of disease at diagnosis across 30 nonreproductive solid cancer types.
Here are five notes from the study:
- Researchers defined stage of disease at diagnosis as localized, regional or distant, with regional and distant cancers considered late-stage.
- Men were significantly more likely to be diagnosed at a regional stage compared to women for 16 of the 30 cancer sites.
The largest differences were observed for tongue, salivary gland, oropharyngeal, thyroid and stomach cancers. - Men were significantly more likely to be diagnosed at a distant stage compared to women for 17 of the 30 cancer sites.
The largest differences were observed for melanoma, tongue, thyroid, salivary gland and stomach cancers. - Compared to women, men were less likely to be diagnosed at a regional stage for laryngeal and bladder cancers, and at a distant stage for bladder, anal and liver cancers.
- “There are a variety of possible explanations for why we found sex differences among most cancer sites we studied,” the study’s lead author, Beth Maclin, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the NCI, said in a July 6 news release from the American Association for Cancer Research. “One explanation could be differences in cancer screening uptake for sites that can be detected through screening. It is also possible that there are differences in healthcare-seeking behaviors […] There is also the possibility that the way clinicians perceive cancer symptoms in males and females differ.”
Read the full study here.
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