Early screening outcomes among non-immigrants and immigrants targeted by BreastScreen Norway, 2010–2019

Aims: This study aimed to analyse results on early screening outcomes, including recall and cancer rates, and histopathological tumour characteristics among non-immigrants and immigrants invited to BreastScreen Norway. Methods: We included information about 2, 763,230 invitations and 2,087,222 screening examinations from 805,543 women aged 50–69 years who were invited to BreastScreen Norway between 2010 and 2019. Women were stratified into three groups based on their birth country: non-immigrants, immigrants born in Western countries and immigrants born in non-Western countries. Age-adjusted regression models were used to analyse early screening outcomes. A random intercept effect was included in models where women underwent several screening examinations. Results: The overall attendance was 77.5% for non-immigrants, 68% for immigrants from Western countries and 51.5% for immigrants from non-Western countries. The rate of screen-detected cancers was 5.9/1000 screening examinations for non-immigrants, 6.3/1000 for immigrants from Western countries and 5.1/1000 for immigrants from non-Western countries. Adjusted for age, the rate did not differ statistically between the groups (p=0.091). The interval cancer rate was 1.7/1000 screening examinations for non-immigrants, 2.4/1000 for immigrants from Western countries and 1.6/1000 for non-Western countries (p