Equal Care Ensures Equivalent Survival Rates Among Races.(cervical cancer survival rate equivalent for African-American and white women when they are given equal access to treatment)

2001 MAR 15 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Survival rates among African-American women with cervical carcinoma are equivalent to those for white women, when treatment is provided in an equal access health care system, according to a study published in the February 15, 2001, issue of Cancer.

These findings suggest that race is not a predictive factor in determining the likelihood of survival among patients diagnosed with cervical carcinoma.

Cervical carcinoma is the fourth most common gynecologic malignancy in the U.S. In the U.S. population at large, African-American women with cervical carcinoma are more likely to die of the disease compared with white women. The five-year survival rate for patients with cervical carcinoma between 1974-1994 declined from 64% to 59% among African-American women, whereas it increased from 70% to 72% for white women during the same time period. Prior reports regarding survival rates for patients with endometrial and ovarian carcinoma indicate that African-American women are treated less often and less aggressively, and are also less likely than white women to receive state-of-the-art treatments.

John H. Farley and colleagues wanted to determine whether race is a contributing factor in the survival of women with cervical carcinoma or if other factors are responsible for the survival differences noted among white and African-American cervical carcinoma patients. They proposed that the racial integration in the U.S. armed forces, which perpetuates equal access to health care, eliminates socioeconomic factors that may be constraining access to health care among the civilian African-American population. Therefore, they anticipated that their study would provide the ideal environment for analyzing the influence of race on survival in patients with cervical carcinoma.

The current study was conducted based on medical records for 1,553 women who were diagnosed with invasive cervical carcinoma between 1988-1999 that were obtained from the Automated Central Tumor Registry of the U.S. Military Health Care System. Sixty-five percent of these women were white and of the remaining 35%, 29% of the women were ...