Socio-economic and ethnocultural influences on geographical disparities in breast cancer screening participation in Victoria, Australia

Geoffrey W Stuart; James A Chamberlain; Roger L Milne

doi:10.3389/fonc.2022.980879

Socio-economic and ethnocultural influences on geographical disparities in breast cancer screening participation in Victoria, Australia

Front Oncol. 2022 Nov 29:12:980879. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2022.980879. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Geoffrey W Stuart^{1

2}, James A Chamberlain¹, Roger L Milne^{1

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Cancer Epidemiology Division, Cancer Council Victoria, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
² Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
³ Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
⁴ Precision Medicine, School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia.

Abstract

Objective: To examine the socio-economic and ethnocultural characteristics of geographical areas that may influence variation in breast cancer screening participation.

Methods: In a cross-sectional analysis breast cancer screening participation for statistical areas in Victoria, Australia (2015-2017) was linked with data from the 2016 Australian Census. We selected four commonly used area-level measures of socio-economic status from the Australian Census (i) income (ii) educational level (iii) occupational status and (iv) employment profile. To assess the ethnocultural characteristics of statistical areas we used the Census measures (i) country of birth (ii) language spoken at home (iii) fluency in English (iv) religion and (v) the proportion of immigrants in an area, together with their recency of migration.

Results: All the selected measures were related to screening participation. There was a high degree of association both within and between socio-economic and ethnocultural characteristics of areas as they relate to screening. Ethnocultural characteristics alone accounted for most of the explained geographical disparity in screening participation.

Conclusions: Geographical disparities in breast cancer screening participation may be due to ethnocultural factors that are confounded with socio-economic factors.

Keywords: breast cancer; cancer screening; culture; ethnicity; geographical areas; socio-economic factors.