Out of every five solid tumor cancer patients who presents with metastatic, stage IV disease doesn't receive any treatment directed at the disease, according to research being presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology by investigators from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Furthermore, they determined that certain factors make it more likely that the patient will not receive any anti-cancer therapy.
They examined over 773,000 records from the National Cancer Database on patients diagnosed between 2000 and 2008 with one of nine stage IV cancers:
Breast cancer
Cervical cancer
Colon cancer
Rectal cancer
Prostate cancer
Uterine cancer
Kidney cancer
Small cell lung cancer
Non-small cell lung cancer
In sum, approximately 159,000 of the patients were identified as having metastatic disease and not having received either systemic chemotherapy or radiotherapy. More than half of the entire patient set had been diagnosed with one of the two lung cancer subtypes, while the cancer with the fewest untreated stage IV patients was prostate cancer.
While stage IV patients sometimes reject treatment, and other patients are not considered good candidates for aggressive treatments, these investigators found that the following factors contributed to making it less likely that a stage IV patient will receive anti-cancer treatment:
- Age (older patients were less likely)
- Race (Black patients were less likely than patients of other races)
- Health insurance (rather, not having it made it less likely)
- Income (namely, lower income correlated with a lower likelihood)
"These findings have potential implications with regards to healthcare policy and access to care," the study's authors concluded.
Source: Medpage Today
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