Investigating the association between individual income and cancer outcomes among Canadians diagnosed with gastric cancer.

Authors

Robert Howden, Natalie Coburn, Shaila Merchant, Tristan Derry, Ekaterina Kosyachkova, Alyson Mahar

Published in

Gastric cancer : official journal of the International Gastric Cancer Association and the Japanese Gastric Cancer Association. Nov 03, 2026. Epub Nov 03, 2026.

Abstract

Evidence of income-based disparities in gastric cancer outcomes exist; however, little research has explored income and gastric cancer outcomes within North America. We investigated the association between individual income and diagnosis with stage IV gastric cancer and death from any cause in the five years following diagnosis.
Canadians diagnosed with gastric cancer between 2010 and 2019 were included using Canadian Census Health and Environmental Cohorts (CanCHEC) linked to the Canadian Cancer Registry, and national hospitalization and vital statistics databases. Individual income was determined prior to the cancer diagnosis and categorized into quintiles (lowest to highest) nationally for each census year. Multivariable logistic regression estimated the association between income and stage IV gastric cancer. Multivariable Cox proportional-hazards regression estimated the association with death from any cause.
8,545 Canadians with gastric cancer were included. We did not observe an association between individual income and presentation with stage IV diagnosis (p = 0.26). We observed a significant association between individual income quintile and death from any cause in the five years following diagnosis (p = 0.003), with patients within the lowest income quintile having 1.18 times the risk of death when compared to patients within the highest income quintile (HR = 1.18; 95% CI: 1.08-1.29).
These findings suggest that income-related barriers may influence outcomes after diagnosis rather than stage at presentation. Future research understanding pathways to worse gastric cancer outcomes for individuals with low income in low incidence countries with universal health care systems that prioritize patient, survivor and caregiver perspectives is needed.

PMID:
42975840
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 04 Nov 2026.

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