Strong association between reduction of late-stage cancers and reduction of cancer-specific mortality in meta-regression of randomized screening trials across multiple cancer types.

Background: Late-stage cancer incidence has been proposed as an early surrogate for mortality in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of cancer screening; however, its validity has not been systematically evaluated across screening RCTs of different cancers.

Methods: We conducted a meta-regression analysis of cancer screening RCTs that reported both late-stage cancer incidence and cancer mortality. Based on a systematic literature review, we included 33 RCTs of screening programs targeting seven cancer types, including lung (n = 12), colorectal (n = 8), breast (n = 5), and prostate (n = 4), among others. We regressed the relative reduction of cancer mortality on the relative reduction of late-stage cancer incidence, inversely weighted for each RCT by the variance of estimated mortality reduction.

Results: Across cancer types, the relative reduction of late-stage cancer incidence was linearly associated with the relative reduction of cancer mortality. Specifically, we observed this association for lung (R² = 0.79 and 0.996 in three recent large trials), breast (R² = 0.94), prostate (R² = 0.98), and colorectal cancer (R² = 0.75 for stage III/IV cancers and 0.93 for stage IV cancers). Trials with a 20% or greater reduction in late-stage cancers were more likely to achieve a significant reduction in cancer mortality. Our results also showed that no reduction of late-stage cancer incidence was associated with no or minimal reduction in cancer mortality.

Conclusions: Meta-regression of historical screening RCTs showed a strong linear association between reductions in late-stage cancer incidence and cancer mortality.