Abstract
Abstract
King Fahad University Hospital of Dammam (KFHU) is a major referral teaching Hospital in the Eastern province in Saudi Arabia. With permission, The Breast Division at KFHU accepts expatriate patients for treatment of breast cancer free of charge. Between Jan 2010 and June 2015 the unit has received 435 new and previously treated breast cancer patients, 35% of them were expatiates. We have noticed that most of these patients had an out of their hand delay in initiating either their investigations for a breast lump or start of active treatment; this has resulted in less than optimum prognosis in many cases. We reported that 75% of these patients had an average of 6-19 months delay before they presented for investigations of a breast mass, 25% had received previous irregular treatment and did not complete their management due to war unrest and travelling. More than 70% of patients who needed radiotherapy did not receive it due to unavailability of treatment facility. Conclusion: In spite of the dramatic improvement in diagnosing early breast cancer, after the wide spread of screening programs in the last decade, we are faced again with recent increase in advanced presentations and poor outcome due to war unrest. With the expected increase in the number of similar cases we think that this category of patients should be addressed as a special category.
Citation Format: Khalifa A, Abdul-Hadi M, Al-Haddad H, Abu-Rida L. Impact of the Middle East unrest on management of breast cancer – A single institution experience. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Annual CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium: 2015 Dec 8-12; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P6-12-05.