Comorbidity and early death from lung cancer

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  The International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership: Module 5, Workstream 2 - An investigation of the influence of co-morbidity on early death from lung cancer

• IRAS ID

  151949

• Contact name

  Brad Groves

• Contact email

  brad.groves@cancer.org.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  Public Health England

• Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier

  14/NW/1372, North West - Liverpool Central

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 6 months, 17 days

• Research summary

  There is significant international variation in five-year survival rates for lung cancer. Numerous studies have now determined that these differences are being driven by a higher number of excess deaths occurring (most frequently in older patients) in the first few months after diagnosis. What is not clear is why early mortality rates vary between countries.

  Advanced stage of disease at presentation,poor quality of care, delays in diagnosis and differences in access to gold–standard treatments have all been suggested as potential explanations of the variation observed but, whilst the evidence indicates these factors contribute, they do not fully account for all the differences seen. Another potentially important, but less well studied, factors are inter-population differences in level of co-morbid disease. If one country has a population with a higher number of co-morbid illnesses when they present this may prevent active treatment and so explain the differences in short-term survival observed.

  This study aims, therefore, to
  1. Investigate the international comparability of population-based comorbidity scores derived from routine health datasets and, if they prove robust, determine the prevalence of comorbidity amongst lung cancer patients across the ICBP jurisdictions.
  2. Use these scores (if sufficiently robust) to investigate the relationship between comorbidity and the surgical treatment, short-term mortality and long-term survival of lung cancer patients both within and across each of the ICBP jurisdictions

• REC name

  North West - Liverpool Central Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  14/NW/1372

• Date of REC Opinion

  13 Oct 2014

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion