A lack of health insurance coverage raises the risk that cancers among Black and Hispanic Americans will be caught too late, a new study suggests.

Being uninsured accounts for a significant proportion of racial and ethnic disparities in cancers that are only detected at a later, more life-threatening stage, researchers found.

“Securing health insurance for everyone is critical,” said lead researcher Parichoy Pal Choudhury, principal scientist of biostatistics at the American Cancer Society (ACS). “This would result in improved access to healthcare that could lead to a reduction of racial and ethnic disparities in the stage of cancer at the time of diagnosis and consequently racial and ethnic disparities in cancer survival.”

For the study, researchers analyzed data about 1.9 million adult patients diagnosed with one of 10 major cancers between 2013 and 2019, drawn from a nationwide hospital cancer database.

The 10 cancers included breast, prostate, colon, lung, cervix, head and neck, stomach, bladder, uterus and skin melanoma.

Black patients are more likely than whites to be diagnosed with eight separate cancers at stage 3 or 4, results showed. At those stages, tumors are larger and the cancers are more likely to have spread elsewhere in the body.

For example, about 39% of Black women are diagnosed with late-stage cervical cancer, compared with 31% of white women. And about 73% of Black adults are diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer, compared with 69% of white adults.

Analysis revealed that a lack of health insurance played a role in those cancer disparities, explaining between 5% and 29% of the disparities, depending on the specific cancer, researchers said.

The same held for Hispanic patients, who were more likely than whites to receive a late diagnosis of six different cancers.

About 64% of Hispanic adults receive a late diagnosis of advanced stomach cancer, compared with 57% of white adults. Likewise, 34% of Hispanic adults and 42% of Black adults are diagnosed with advanced melanoma, compared with 19% of white adults.

A lack of health insurance explained 13% and 69% of the late-diagnosis disparities between Hispanic and white patients, researchers found.

The new study was published Oct. 30 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

“This study builds on the extensive amount of evidence showing the importance of health insurance coverage and underscores the need for elected officials to prioritize access to care for everyone,” said Lisa Lacasse, president of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network.

Lacasse said this study supports the need to protect and strengthen the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

“The ACA includes many provisions that have meaningfully improved the health care system and helped reduce barriers to care for cancer patients, survivors, and their families,” Lacasse said in an ACS news release. “We urge lawmakers and the courts to preserve and strengthen these critical patient protections so that all people have a fair and just opportunity to prevent, detect, treat, and survive cancer.”

More information

The National Cancer Institute has more on cancer disparities.

SOURCE: American Cancer Society, news release, Oct. 30, 2024

Source: HealthDay

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