Incidence of Breast Cancer in the United States: Current and Future Trends

BACKGROUND: The incidence of breast cancer increased in the United States until circa 2000 then decreased, mostly among women with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive cancers. Time trends provide important clues for cancer etiology and prevention; however, the observed trends of ER-positive and ER-negative breast cancers can be biased by missing ER data. METHODS: We developed a simple imputation method to correct invasive female breast cancer incidence for missing or unknown ER expression, using nationally representative data from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program during 1980-2008, including 588,720 invasive female breast cancer patients with 471,336,233 woman-years of follow-up. Corrected rates of ER-positive and ER-negative breast cancers were used to calculate age-standardized incidence rates, estimated annual percentage changes, and projections derived from age-period-cohort models. RESULTS: The recent decrease in the incidence of breast cancer overall stabilized near 200 per 100,000 woman-years by 2007-2008, reflecting a transient decrease in ER-positive cancers and a steady decrease in ER-negative cancers. The projected incidence rate for breast cancer overall through the year 2016 was similar to the incidence rate during 2007-2008. In contrast, rates of ER-positive breast cancers were projected to increase 5.3% (95% confidence interval = 5.2% to 5.4%), whereas rates of ER-negative breast cancers were projected to decrease 11.4% (95% confidence interval = 11.3% to 11.6%) during 2009-2016. CONCLUSION: Recent changes in breast cancer incidence overall reflect the superimposition of divergent trends in ER-positive and ER-negative cancers. If current trends continue, the incidence of ER-positive breast cancers will increase, the incidence of ER-negative breast cancers will continue to decrease, and the incidence of breast cancer overall will remain similar to its current level.