In response to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) RFA-DP-05-071, Louisiana Tumor Registry (LTR) submits this application to conduct a patterns of care study (POC) for the two priority cancers: female breast and prostate. The long term goal of this study is to further develop the capacity of LTR to engage in advanced cancer surveillance activities that will contribute to improving care that cancer patients receive in Louisiana and in the nation. The objectives of this study are to: (1) determine the proportion of patients who received the state-of-art treatment for stages l-lll female breast cancer and describe the treatment patterns for all stages of prostate cancer; (2) determine how the tumor, patient, provider, and health system characteristics are associated with different cancer treatment for breast cancer prostate cancers; (3) assess the completeness and quality of the stage and first course of treatment data for these two cancers in LTR routine dataset. All patients aged 20 and older who had no prior cancer except non- melanoma skin cancer and were diagnosed microscopically with one of the study cancers in the two most current diagnosis years available, as determined by the CDC's Steering Committee, will be eligible for this study. We propose to randomly select 480 white and 480 black eligible cases for each of the study cancers and for each year of the 2003 and 2004. All eligible Asians/Pacific Islanders, American Indians/Alaska Natives and Hispanics will be included. We are expected to have a total of 1,000 cases for each of the study years and for each of the study cancer sites. We will collaborate with the investigators from CDC and other participating states to develop the study protocol, manual and data entry instruments, which will be based on the previous CDC's CONCORD/POC study. Data Collection will be carried out by the abstractors from LTR central offices, regional and hospital registries. Hospital records (inpatient and outpatient) of the sampled cases will be reviewed to collect information required by this study. Special effort will be made to verify treatment information with treating physicians unless the treatment information is from unified hospital records. The inforamtion collected for this study will assist health care providers as they seek to provide the highest quality of care for their patients andwill help with interventions to improve quality of care for all cancer patients.
