Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Lung cancer has been, for a long time, an important issue worldwide. Although healthcare surrounding this fatal chronic disease has been improving, it still remains very problematic in many under-privileged communities, especially in Canada's Inuit population. In Nunavik, the northern third part of the province of Quebec, lung cancer incidence has been recorded to be the highest in the province. The majority of the population in Nunavik is Inuit. We still don't know much on the demographics and cancer outcomes of the patients in this region. In this first step of our project, we would like to explore the demographics, lung cancer subtypes, stages at diagnosis, and survival rates of these patients. We want to compare them with their non-Inuit counterparts, in Montreal, to see whether there is a difference in survival after diagnosis. We would also like to see whether these patients' characteristics differ between the two coasts within Nunavik (the Hudson coast and the Ungava coast). To do so, we included every adult patients newly diagnosed with primary lung cancer, between January 1st, 2005 and December 31st, 2016. They either resided in Nunavik or in Montreal. We used different statistical tests to evaluate the differences we observed. We noted an unequal gender distribution of lung cancer patients between the two coasts, with more female patients in the Ungava sub-region and more male patients in the Hudson sub-region. Moreover, we observed that the patients from Nunavik were generally younger than those from Montreal in terms of their age at diagnosis. The Nunavik patients also had different subtypes of lung cancer and possibly an higher all-cause mortality. More research is still being done to further explore and analyse these differences, and to identify any potential factors that may be contributing to these differences.