Cancers in adolescents and young adults (AYA) population: 5-year experience from a cancer registry in India.

Introduction: The distribution of cancer burden is unequal across the different age groups. The AYA age group have been defined by the National Cancer Institute as diagnoses occurring between the ages of 15 and 39. This age group shows the different features in terms of cancer biology, risk factors, prognosis etc., as compare to the other age groups.

Material and methods: This was a retrospective observational study. Data collection was done from 2017 to 2021. Data was collected from Hospital Based Cancer Registry (HBCR) that registers all new histopathologically proven cancers reporting to its various clinical departments. Data regarding age, gender and site were collected. A standardized hospital-based cancer registries core form was used for the collection of the data.

Result: From the year 2017-2021 a total of 12,827 cancer patients were registered in our HBCR. From the total number 7,583 (59.12%) were males and 5,244 (40.88%) were females. In these 5 years 2,874 (22.4%) were registered in our hospital in the age group of 15-39 years (AYA) and 9953 (77.59%) were 40 and above the 40 years of age. In case of females breast cancer in adolescents (15-29) accounts about 6.77% next to breast cancer ovarian cancer accounts about 3.38%, while as in case of adults (29-39) the breast cancer remains at the highest percentage of 12.12% but uterine cancer comes at the second number with 6.63% this picture continues in the older adults with breast cancer (9.7%) at the highest percentage and next to breast cancer uterine cancer remains at the second number. Head and neck cancer cases were highest in males in both the age groups of AYA population that is adolescents (15-29) and in adults (29-39) with 17.41% and 35.7% respectively. The time trends of AYA cancers and old age cancers from 2017 to 2021 in males was showing an increasing trend with 18.45% to 21.53% except for the year 2019 when the drop was found and it might be because of the Covid-19 pandemic in India. The time trend of AYA cancers and old age cancers from 2017 to 2021 in female patients was showing an increasing trend from 19.34% to 27.05%.

Conclusion: This study was done to find out the cancer burden of AYAs. The purpose of this study was to find out the specific AYA cancer profile and highlight the need of targeted cancer control measures to reduce the cancer burden in this age group.