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Introduction: The increasing survival of patients with breast cancer has prompted the assessment of mortality due to all causes of death in these patients. We estimated the absolute risks of death from different causes, useful for health-care planning and clinical prediction, as well as cause-specific hazards, useful for hypothesis generation on etiology and risk factors., Materials and Methods: Using data from population-based cancer registries we performed a retrospective study on a cohort of women diagnosed with primary breast cancer. We carried out a competing-cause analysis computing cumulative incidence functions (CIFs) and cause-specific hazards (CSHs) in the whole cohort, separately by age, stage and registry area., Results: The study cohort comprised 12,742 women followed up for six years. Breast cancer showed the highest CIF, 13.71%, and cardiovascular disease was the second leading cause of death with a CIF of 3.60%. The contribution of breast cancer deaths to the CIF for all causes varied widely by age class: 89.25% in women diagnosed at age <50 years, 72.94% in women diagnosed at age 50-69 and 48.25% in women diagnosed at age ≥70. Greater CIF variations were observed according to stage: the contribution of causes other than breast cancer to CIF for all causes was 73.4% in women with stage I disease, 42.9% in stage II-III and only 13.2% in stage IV. CSH computation revealed temporal variations: in women diagnosed at age ≥70 the CSH for breast cancer was equaled by that for cardiovascular disease and "other diseases" in the sixth year following diagnosis, and an early peak for breast cancer was identified in the first year following diagnosis. Among women aged 50-69 we identified an early peak for breast cancer followed by a further peak near the second year of follow-up. Comparison by geographic area highlighted conspicuous variations: the highest CIF for cardiovascular disease was more than 70% higher than the lowest, while for breast cancer the highest CIF doubled the lowest., Conclusion: The integrated interpretation of absolute risks and hazards suggests the need for multidisciplinary surveillance and prevention using community-based, holistic and well-coordinated survivorship care models., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Contiero, Boffi, Borgini, Fabiano, Tittarelli, Mian, Vittadello, Epifani, Ardizzone, Cirilli, Boschetti, Marguati, Cascone, Tumino, Fanetti, Giumelli, Candela, Scuderi, Castelli, Bongiorno, Barigelletti, Perotti, Veronese, Turazza, Crivaro, Tagliabue and the MAPACA Working Group.)

Purpose: Cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM) always presents as a complex disease process with poor prognosis. The objective of the present study was to explore the influence of solitary or multiple cancers on the prognosis of patients with CMM to better understand the landscape of CMM., Methods: We reviewed the records of CMM patients between 2004 and 2015 from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program. The cumulative incidence function was used to represent the probabilities of death. A novel causal inference method was leveraged to explore the risk difference to death between different types of CMM, and nomograms were built based on competing risk models., Results: The analysis cohort contained 165,043 patients with CMM as the first primary malignancy. Patients with recurrent CMM and multiple primary tumors had similar overall survival status (p = 0.064), while their demographics and cause-specific death demonstrated different characteristics than those of patients with solitary CMM ( p < 0.001), whose mean survival times are 75.4 and 77.3 months and 66.2 months, respectively. Causal inference was further applied to unveil the risk difference of solitary and multiple tumors in subgroups, which was significantly different from the total population ( p < 0.05), and vulnerable groups with high risk of death were identified. The established competing risk nomograms had a concordance index >0.6 on predicting the probabilities of death of CMM or other cancers individually across types of CMM., Conclusion: Patients with different types of CMM had different prognostic characteristics and different risk of cause-specific death. The results of this study are of great significance in identifying the high risk of cause-specific death, enabling targeted intervention in the early period at both the population and individual levels., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Li, Li, Yi, Li, Huang, Ren, Ma, Li, Guo, Chen, Ma, Shang, Song and Hu.)