Educational Levels and Survival in Indian Patients with Cancer of Uterine Cervix

Uterine cervix cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths amongst women in the world (Ferlay et al., 2014). Effective screening programme has been ongoing worldwide, but still the burden of cervical cancers remains high, especially in low income countries where it is the leading cause of cancer in females. In India it has been reported to have the highest disease frequency with 134, 000 new cases and 73,000 deaths (Arbyn et al., 2011). The five year survival in patients with uterine cervix cancer in low-middle income countries is low, especially diagnosed in advanced stages (Razak et al., 2013). The differences of survival in patients with carcinoma of the uterine cervix with socio-economic health inequalities is known and it has also been suggested that measuring education levels based on census can serve as important surveillance tools for monitoring temporal trends in uterine cervical cancer-related health inequalities (Milner and Watts, 1987; Schrijvers et al., 1994; Singh et al., 2004) .The female literacy levels in India according to the population census of 2011 is 65.46% and in the state of Assam it is lower than the national average and it stands at 63.0% (Census of India, 2011). Educational level can be an important demographic parameter for surveillance of uterine cervix cancer survival in our population, as the educational levels are abysmally low amongst females in certain regions of the country. In this analysis we had