“Even if African-American women receive evidence-based care, it may mitigate but does not completely eliminate the survival disparities that we saw based on race,” says Jason D Wright (above) of Columbia University’s Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York. “We still need to work and look at other factors that may be responsible for the survival disparities that we see.”
Wright and his colleagues reviewed the cases of 310,000 U.S. women treated for endometrial cancer from 2004 through 2016 to see whether the women received evidence-based care, which is linked to an improved prognosis. Black women were less likely than White women to receive the recommended care, but even they did receive similar treatment, Black woman were still more likely than White women to die within 5 years.
“We still have a lot of work that needs to be done to better understand why there’s this discrepancy in survival,” says Wright. “What we have seen is not completely due to the quality of care that African-American women are receiving.”
Endometrial cancer is typically a cancer that’s highly curable with early detection and appropriate treatment, Wright points out. “To see the survival disparities with a highly curable cancer is particularly problematic. We need to address that so we can have a higher percentage of women with this cancer who can be treated appropriately, and hopefully cured.”
- See “Racial Disparities Exist in Endometrial Cancer Care” by Ellie Leick on the Oncology Nursing News website (March 27, 2020)
- See the abstract of the scientific paper “Impact of quality of care on racial disparities in survival for endometrial cancer” by Allan B Huang et al.
- See the full text of the editorial “Eliminating disparities in endometrial cancer: adherence to high-quality care is not enough” by Electra D. Paskett and Brittany M. Bernardo
