Via The Star: Poorer Canadians less likely to survive cancer. Excerpt:
Cancer patients from poor neighbourhoods have a greater chance of dying prematurely than their wealthier counterparts, says a new study, describing a problem that persists despite universal health care in Canada.
Much of the literature on the topic, especially in the United States, has partially explained this disparity by saying it is due to the fact that poorer people are diagnosed when their cancer is at a later stage. But this particular study of Ontario patients didn’t find that to be the case.
“I think a lot of us were attributing much more of an impact of the stage at diagnosis, and this study really has highlighted that no, that’s not the major factor,” Heather Chappell, director of cancer control policy at the Canadian Cancer Society, said in reaction to the findings.
Chappell said it means researchers and the medical community need to be looking at what other reasons might be at play.
“There still is a survival disparity and we need to work to understand why that is the case and to correct that difference in outcome,” agreed lead researcher Dr. Christopher Booth of the Queen’s University Cancer Research Institute.
The study was published online Monday in Cancer, a journal of the American Cancer Society.
It looked at median household incomes from the 2001 Canadian census and used the Ontario Cancer Registry to identify patients diagnosed from 2003 to 2007.
The chance of a woman from a poor community being alive five years after diagnosis of breast cancer is 77 per cent, compared to 84 per cent for affluent women, Booth said.
Fifty-two per cent of patients with colorectal cancer from the lowest socioeconomic groups are alive five years after diagnosis, compared to 60 per cent of those in the most affluent communities.
“These are important and meaningful differences,” Booth said in an interview from Kingston, Ont.
“If we had a form of chemotherapy or cancer treatment that led to an improvement or difference in five-year survival of seven, eight, nine per cent — the order of magnitude we’re seeing with these differences — it would be a blockbuster home run as far as cancer treatment advances.”
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