Introduction: Cancer is 11 times more likely to develop in people above 65 years compared to younger people. Although we know the geriatric age group people are increasing in view of increased life expectancy and those diagnosed with cancers have increased over the last decades, there is a deficit of clinical and epidemiological data from developing countries. The objective: to analyse the incidence, sex ratio, histology and patterns of cancer incidence in geriatric population. Material & Methods: All patients aged 65 years and above with the diagnosis of cancer who were registered in Department of Medical Oncology, Government Rajaji Hospital, Madurai during a period of January 2017 to December 2021 were included. Basic information on age, sex, diagnosis and histology were collected. Results: There were total 1260 geriatric patients (16.4% of total cancer patients in the institution) in which 57 %( 719) patients were male and 43 %( 541) patients were female. Among the patients registered , 681 (54%), 373(29.6%),142 (11.2%) ,41 (3%) and 18(1.4%) patients were in the age group of 65-69, 70-74, 75-79, 80-84, and more than or equal to 85 years , respectively. The three most common sites in carcinomas were lung, breast, upper gastrointestinal. The most prevalent cancers male is lung and females is breast which is also in par with the world data. But when total incidence is looked into, the hospital incidence in much low when compared to world (51.56%) and Indian data(34.4%) Conclusions: Incidence of cancer in geriatric patients in world and India is much higher when compared with our hospital data. This has to be seriously evaluated as this difference may be due to the ignorance of our patient population, lack of access to health care facilities; neglected old age patients and poor social support The first step towards delivering the optimal cancer care to this patients are identifying these subset of patient.
Impact Factor
2022: 6.012
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