Thank you very much, Mr. Naqvi. I'm sorry your mother was diagnosed, but I'm very grateful that she was screen-detected, because it's a very different diagnosis.
As noted, there is a geographic difference in screening programs in the country. Some women who live in the provinces of British Columbia and Nova Scotia are able to participate in screening programs, and others are not. We were able to look at over 55,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer in Canada over a 10-year period. What we could see is that the women who lived in a province where there was a screening program offered for women in their forties had a significant increase in the 10-year net survival of their breast cancer, which was on par with some of the chemotherapeutic agents we use for every woman diagnosed with a hormone receptor-positive cancer.
We found there was a significant decrease in breast cancer mortality for women living in the provinces that had screening programs. What we didn't know is how many women in those provinces were screen-detected, because that's not something we currently track. However, we could see a marked improvement. It correlated with a study we had done previously that showed the stage at which breast cancer was diagnosed was significantly lower—stage 1—if they lived in those provinces, compared to the ones that did not screen. It also had a benefit for women who were older, in their fifties, and increased improvement in their stage and overall survival.