Adjuvant radiation not often recommended
Women diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer were more apt to receive adjuvant chemotherapy, but at the expense of completing locoregional radiation therapy, according to data recently presented at the Fifth American Association for Cancer Research Conference on The Science of Cancer Health Disparities.
“Radiation treatment decreases the risk for breast cancer recurring and improves survival from the disease,” said Abigail Silva, MPH, Susan G. Komen Cancer Disparities Research trainee at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
When eligible, black and Hispanic women are less likely than white women to obtain radiation treatment, according to previous studies. Silva says this may partly explain racial/ethnic disparities in breast cancer outcomes.
In their quest to further assess the inconsistencies among guideline-concordant radiation treatment, Silva and colleagues collected interview and medical record data from a population-based study of patients with single invasive primary tumors. The study participants included 397 non-Hispanic whites, 411 non-Hispanic blacks, and 181 Hispanics.
Of the patients who were eligible for radiation treatment, 88% received a recommendation for radiation treatment. Treatment was accepted by 93% of those patients. However, only 97% of patients who accepted treatment actually received radiation. Therefore, only 79% of the initial population of women who were eligible for radiation treatment actually initiated radiation therapy.
Data indicated that minority women were more likely to have moderate- to high-grade tumors and symptomatically detected tumors, yet they were less likely to initiate radiation treatment compared with non-Hispanic white women.
“We also found that patients who got chemotherapy were less likely to get radiation when they needed it,” Silva said. “Because minorities tended to have more aggressive breast cancer that more often required chemotherapy, this disproportionately affected them.”
In light of the study results, Silva and colleagues stated that clinicians might not be recommending guideline-concordant radiation treatment to all eligible patients.
Source: AACR.