Highlights
- •In France, vaginal cancer represented 0.9 % of genital cancers in women and median age at diagnosis was 75 years.
- •There has been a decrease in incidence rates for vaginal cancer in France between 1990 and 2018.
- •The annual decrease was similar in the most recent years, namely between 2010 and 2018.
- •The prognosis of vaginal cancer remains poor.
Abstract
Objective
The aim of this study was to analyze trends in the incidence of vaginal cancer in
France over a 28-year period and to present survival for recently-diagnosed women.
Methods
French cancer registries provided data on invasive vaginal cancers diagnosed from
1990 to 2015 and followed up through June 2018. Trends in incidence were analyzed
using a Poisson model with a bidimensional penalized spline of age and year at diagnosis.
Net survival analysis was restricted to recently-diagnosed cases (2010–2015) and used
a novel approach based on a bidimensional penalized spline of age and time-since-diagnosis
to model excess mortality hazard.
Results
With 162 new cases estimated in France in 2018, vaginal cancer represented 0.9 % of
genital cancers in French women. In 2018, the world population age-standardized incidence
rate was 0.2 per 100,000 person-years, median age at diagnosis was 75 years. The standardized
incidence rate decreased significantly by 3 % per year (95 % CI, −3.8; −2.2) between
1990 and 2018 (0.4 cases per 100,000 person-year in 1990, vs 0.2 in 2018). Age-standardized
net survival at 1 and 5 years after diagnosis was respectively 74 % and 45 %.
Conclusions
This study confirms that vaginal cancer is still a rare malignancy in France with
5-year net survival that remains low. We observed a consistent decrease in the incidence
rate between 1990 and 2018. It may be too early to attribute these trends to a positive
impact of vaccination campaigns against hrHPV infection, since vaginal cancer mainly
affects older women and HPV vaccination has only been available since the early 2000s,
and only targets young girls.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: February 13, 2023
Accepted:
February 10,
2023
Received in revised form:
January 26,
2023
Received:
October 28,
2022
Identification
Copyright
© 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
