[Morpho-epidemiological profile of elderly subject cancer in Dakar].

UNLABELLED: The elderly is defined by WHO as any individual who has a chronological age greater than or equal to 60 years. The number of elderly is growing. The scarcity of work on malignant tumor pathology elderly contrasting with the difficulty of support have raised the interest of this work.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is a descriptive and retrospective study carried out on a periode of 5 years based on the reported analyses of all public laboratories of anatomical pathology and cytology in Dakar.

RESULTS: During the five years of our study on 1,264 cases of tumors of the elderly we identified 699 cases of cancer. The average age of patients was 68.82 years with a discreet male predominance (sex ratio=1.07). The most common malignant tumors were cancers of the prostate (23.74%), cancers of the cervix (16.88%), cancer of the breast (10.72%) and cancers of the skin and soft tissues (9.15%). Some tumor sites (stomach, larynx, esophagus, ganglion, sinus, bladder, liver, lungs and bronchi, vulva, eye, jaw, pancreas, bone) had always proved malignant. Tumor location was primitive in 97.56% and metastatic in 2.44%. The histological type of primary cancer was met by far dominated by carcinomas (91.20%) followed by lymphoma (3.81%), sarcomas (3.66%) and melanoma (1.31%). All cases of metastatic were carcinomas.