Statistics Canada says that over 220,000 new cancer cases are diagnosed annually in Canada. Breast, lung, prostate and colorectal cancers account for close to half of these diagnoses. Cancer outcomes are dependent on cancer type, stage at diagnosis, and treatment. They may also vary in part because of differences in access to health care and screening programs, treatment options and follow-up care. Unequal access to treatment may be influenced by several socioeconomic factors and result in poorer survival outcomes.
The monitoring agency says, when cancer patients are split according to the income group they belong to, the proportion who received timely surgical treatment consistently increases with income for all top four cancer types.
The largest difference in the proportion of patients who underwent surgery within six months of their cancer diagnosis is seen in lung cancer. Between 2012 and 2015, 65.8% of patients in the highest income group received surgical treatment in the six months following their diagnosis, whereas the proportion was 49.5% for those in the lowest income group.
Differences in surgical treatment were also seen between the highest and lowest income groups for breast (87.8% vs. 81.4%) and colorectal (85.7% vs. 81.2%) cancers.
The proportion of prostate cancer cases requiring surgical treatment was much lower since early-stage prostate cancers usually tend to be the focus of active medical surveillance rather than surgery. Still, the proportion of patients who received surgery in the highest income group was higher than that in the lowest (37.3% vs. 30.9%), as was the case for the other cancer types.

Stats Canada says, while these proportions reflect differences only between income groups, several other lifestyle, geographic and socioeconomic factors also influence treatment access and warrant further scrutiny. The Canadian Partnership Against Cancer’s recent report, Lung cancer and equity: A focus on income and geography, examines the impact of both geographic and socioeconomic factors on treatment access using databases released on Wednesday.