Lower attendance rates in immigrant versus non-immigrant women in the Norwegian Breast Cancer Screening Programme

The Norwegian Breast Cancer Screening Programme invites women aged 50-69 to biennial mammographic screening. Although 84% of invited women have attended at least once, attendance rates vary across the country. We investigated attendance rates among various immigrant groups compared with non-immigrants in the programme.

There were 4,053,691 invitations sent to 885,979 women between 1996 and 2015. Using individual level population-based data from the Cancer Registry and Statistics Norway, we examined percent attendance and calculated incidence rate ratios, comparing immigrants with non-immigrants, using Poisson regression, following women's first invitation to the programme and for ever having attended.

Immigrant women had lower attendance rates than the rest of the population, both following the first invitation (53.1% versus 76.1%) and for ever having attended (66.9% versus 86.4%). Differences in attendance rates between non-immigrant and immigrant women were less pronounced, but still present, when adjusted for sociodemographic factors. We also identified differences in attendance between immigrant groups. Attendance increased with duration of residency in Norway. A subgroup analysis of migrants' daughters showed that 70.0% attended following the first invitation, while 82.3% had ever attended.

Immigrant women had lower breast cancer screening attendance rates. The rationale for immigrant women's non-attendance needs to be explored through further studies targeting women from various birth countries and regions.