Despite major breakthroughs in lung cancer treatment throughout the twenty-first century, racial disparities in who receives curative care have remained virtually unchanged since the 1990s, according to a new study led by scholars at the Yale School of Medicine.
“There’s been a lot of increased attention to disparities in cancer care over the past 20 or 30 years,” said lead author Olivia Lynch, a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale. “Given that, we wanted to ask: Have there been improvements in which patient populations receive treatment?”
For their study, the research team examined data from 2005 to 2019 regarding 28,287 Black and White patients diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer. The authors only included patients who were Medicare beneficiaries, ensuring that the study’s findings could not be explained by differences in patients’ access to health insurance.
While the overall use of curative treatments, such as surgery, increased over time, Black patients were consistently less likely to receive treatment throughout the entire study period. Over a 30-year time period, racial disparities in who receives treatment for lung cancer have narrowed by just 4 percent.
“If you’re developing cures for cancer, but it’s not getting into the hands of everybody who needs it, then you haven’t succeeded,” said Dr. Lynch.
