Cervical cancer screening in Middle Eastern and Asian migrants to Australia: a record linkage study

Australia's organized cervical screening program recommends two-yearly screening for women aged 18-69 years and reminder letters are sent at 27 months. Cervical screening registers hold comprehensive information on screening, but not country of birth. A linkage study was performed in order to assess cervical screening behavior in migrants.

To assess screening participation, we linked year 2000 records for 12,541 Middle Eastern/Asian-born women 20-54 years of age, and an age and area matched random sample of 12,143 Australian-born women in the New South Wales (NSW) Midwives Data Collection (MDC), which records country of birth, to screening register records. Screening behavior after 2000 was assessed in women without a recorded prior cervical abnormality.

The odds ratios for being screened at least once within a 3 year period, with reference to Australian-born women and adjusted for age, parity, socioeconomic status and smoking, were 0.88 (95% CI: 0.81-0.97) and 0.74 (95% CI: 0.70-0.79) in women born in the Middle East and Asia, respectively. Screening increased with increasing socioeconomic status (SES), absence of smoking and greater parity in Australian-born women but little, if at all, in migrant women. In a sensitivity analysis in which hospital admitted patients were the source of population samples, some patterns were sufficiently different to suggest that selection for illness can affect the strength and direction of associations in linked data.

Migrant women from Asian and Middle-eastern countries are less likely than Australian-born women to participate in cervical screening at the recommended interval. Their likelihood of screening is also less related to socioeconomic status, smoking and parity than that in Australian-born women.