About the project
Older people are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer at a later stage or in an emergency. Reducing the time between first presentation in primary care with a cancer symptom and cancer diagnosis (the diagnostic interval) can help to minimise the number of cases diagnosed at a late stage and so improve survival rates. Similarly, timely dementia diagnosis can help patients gain access to rapid specialist assessment treatment and support, thereby maximising quality of life and delaying admission to institutionalised care facilities. This project will investigate the determinants of late diagnosis of cancer and dementia in elderly people using linked data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink, the Hospital Episodes Statistics and the Cancer Registry. Factors that will be investigated include patterns of health service use, the presence of comorbidities, in particular comorbidities that may offer alternative explanations for cancer or dementia symptoms, area-based measures of social deprivation, and other patient characteristics such as age, sex, ethnicity, smoking, alcohol drinking and BMI.