Abstract:
Breast cancer is a foremost cause of death worldwide, ranks fifth among causes of
death from all types of cancers; this is the most common cause of cancer death in
women among both developing and developed countries. Breast cancer ranks first
among the most frequent cancers in women of Ethiopia. In spite of the high
incidence, mortality rate, and survival status among breast cancer patients was not
determined in Ethiopia. The purpose of this study was to identify factors affecting
the time to death among breast cancer patients attending anti-cancer treatment
from September 2015 till December 2018 at Ayder Comprehensive Specialized
Hospital. Methods: Hospital-based retrospective cohort study was conducted among
breast cancer patients. Kaplan-Meier survival curve together with log-rank test was
deployed to test for variations in the survival among predictor variables. Cox
regression was used at a 5% level of significance to determine the net effect of each
independent variable on the time to death of breast cancer clients. Results: From
the Cox proportional model, patients with age, educational status, residence,
Baseline Tumor size &Pathology type (LIC) were found to be a statistically significant
effect (p < 0.05) on the risk of mortality due to breast cancer and the median
survival time of breast cancer patient was 34.50 months. Conclusion: the finding of
this study showed that age, educational status, residence, Baseline Tumor size
&Pathology type (LIC) were influential affecting time to death of breast cancer
