Abstract
Introduction: Cancer remains a major public health concern due to its severity, its prevalence, and its high incidence. However, there are no data on its full extent in Burkina Faso given the lack of functioning national registry of cancer. This study aims to determine the incidence of gynecologic and breast cancers.



Methods: This was a study on series of cases that was conducted between December 2019 and August 2020. It focused on gynecologic and breast cancers cases diagnosed between 1988 and 2018. The data were collected from pathology laboratory registers in Burkina Faso. The following parameters were analyzed: age, gender, site, histogenetic and histologic type. The global incidences and annual means were estimated for gynecologic and breast cancers and the trend of these cancers was described by using two trend curves.



Results: 5471 cases of gynecologic and breast cancers were recorded in our study. The mean age of patients was 48.1 ± 13.6 years. The most prevalent cancers were breast cancer (55.3%), cervical cancer (26.5%), and uterine cancer (11%). Histologically, adenocarcinomas (62.8%) were the most common cancer, affecting the breast (85.4%) and uterus (6.6%). Among sarcomas, fibrosarcomas were the most frequent (51.6%), and more often affected the breast (44.4%) and uterus (31.7%). The mean annual incidence of cancers was 176.4 ± 15.8 cases. The global increase rate was 121.8 in 31 years giving an average yearly increase rate of 3.9. Overall, the incidence of breast and gynecologic cancers has increased between 1988 and 2018.

Conclusion: The female cancers are frequent and occur at a relatively young age. It is important to put in place several screening and prevention measures which are accessible to the target population while implementing the cancer registry that would generate reliable statistics.

cancers, gynecologic, breasts, epidemiology