Background: Due to considerable health status differences in the elderly population, research limited to narrow\r\nage-spans might be an advantage. In this population-based controlled study we compare short-term (<5 years)\r\n(STS) and long-term (=5 years) (LTS) cancer survivors and cancer-free controls aged 60-69 years from two\r\nNorwegian health registers; the Health Survey of North-Tr�¸ndelag County (HUNT-2 study) and the Cancer Registry\r\nof Norway (CRN). We examined possible factors associated with being cancer survivor.\r\nMethods: Among 9,089 individuals aged 60-69 who participated in HUNT-2, 334 had been diagnosed with\r\ninvasive primary cancer from 1 month to 42 years before HUNT-2 according to CRN and self-report. An overall\r\nrandom sample of controls without cancer five times larger than the sample of cases (N = 1,670) were drawn from\r\nthe parent cohort.\r\nResults: The cancer sample comprised 128 STS and 206 LTS. For most variables no significant differences were\r\nobserved between LTS and STS. LTS were significantly more women, and cases with gynaecological cancer, with\r\nphysical impairment and more thyroid diseases compared to STS. When comparing all the survivors with controls,\r\nthe survivors showed significantly higher rate of pensioning, decreased self-rated health, more physical impairment\r\nand thyroid diseases, daily use of medication and psychotropics and higher level of anxiety and Framingham Risk\r\nscore. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that increasing age, being female, physical impairment and\r\nthyroid diseases all were significantly associated with being survivor versus controls.\r\nConclusion: STS and LTS showed mostly similar situation. Compared to controls, the survivors reported somewhat\r\npoorer physical and mental health, but these differences were of doubtful clinical significance.
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