Random effects models of tumour growth for investigating interval breast cancer

Abstract

In Nordic countries and across Europe, breast cancer screening participation is high. However, a significant number of breast cancer cases are still diagnosed due to symptoms between screening rounds, termed “interval cancers”. Radiologists use the interval cancer proportion as a proxy for the screening false negative rate (ie, 1‐sensitivity). Our objective is to enhance our understanding of interval cancers by applying continuous tumour growth models to data from a study involving incident invasive breast cancer cases. Building upon previous findings regarding stationary distributions of tumour size and growth rate distributions in non‐screened populations, we develop an analytical expression for the proportion of interval breast cancer cases among regularly screened women. Our approach avoids relying on estimated background cancer rates. We make specific parametric assumptions concerning tumour growth and detection processes (screening or symptoms), but our framework easily accommodates alternative assumptions. We also show how our developed analytical expression for the proportion of interval breast cancers within a screened population can be incorporated into an approach for fitting tumour growth models to incident case data. We fit a model on 3493 cases diagnosed in Sweden between 2001 and 2008. Our methodology allows us to estimate the distribution of tumour sizes at the most recent screening for interval cancers. Importantly, we find that our model‐based expected incidence of interval breast cancers aligns closely with observed patterns in our study and in a large Nordic screening cohort. Finally, we evaluate the association between screening interval length and the interval cancer proportion. Our analytical expression represents a useful tool for gaining insights into the performance of population‐based breast cancer screening programs.