Black patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer in California were less likely to receive chemotherapy and had a 17 percent higher chance of death compared with White patients.
“These troubling statistics are the result of a disparity in access to health care,” said Mustafa Raoof, MD, a surgical oncologist at City of Hope in Southern California.
“We observed that if Black people with metastatic colorectal cancer had access to subspecialists with expertise in liver resection, they would not experience higher numbers of unnecessary deaths due to underutilization of life-saving therapies.”
“There is a vast underutilization of liver surgery as a potentially curative treatment for colorectal liver metastases,” said Yuman Fong, MD, also from City of Hope, “This missed opportunity is even more common for Black patients than for the general population.”
See “Racial Disparities in Management of Colorectal Cancer Spreading to the Liver” on the American Society of Clinical Oncology website (October 10, 2020)
