Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Transplantation is often withheld from patients with a previous history of cancer due to the risk of cancer recurrence because their immune system needs to be suppressed. However, little is known about the outcomes of these patients compared to those without pre-transplant cancer history. This study will use information from the CORR registry - a registry of all patients having a solid organ transplant in Ontario linked to information from the Ontario Cancer Registry, a registry of people developing cancer in Ontario. We are interested in evaluating if the outcomes transplant patients with previous history of cancer are worse than for patients without prior cancer history. We will explore whether these patients are at increased risk of all-cause death, cancer death, developing cancer over time, or developing organ/graft failure. If we identify differences that have an impact on survival, we can then develop strategies to improve outcomes. For example, if patients that wait longer to be transplanted because of a requirement of a specific set of time in remission have increase mortality due to other causes (e.g. cardiovascular or organ failure), reducing wait times before transplantation would be an important strategy to improve survival in this group of patients.