Studies from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in the Area of Cancer Published (Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Outcomes Among Long-Term Survivors of Childhood Cancer: A Scoping Review): Cancer

2021 NOV 12 (NewsRx) — By a news reporter associate news editor at Insurance Daily News — Researchers discuss new findings in cancer. According to news hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, by NewsRx editors, the study stated: “Five-year childhood cancer survival has increased significantly over the past 50 years; however, racial/ethnic differences in health outcomes of survival have not been systematically assessed. This scoping review summarized the health disparities between racial/ethnic minorities (particularly non-Hispanic black and Hispanic) and non-Hispanic white childhood cancer survivors together, and clarified factors that may explain the differences in health outcomes.”

The news editor quoted the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital study: “We used the terms ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘child cancer’, ‘child cancer’ and ‘survivor’ to search the title and abstract for the articles published in PubMed and Scopus from inception to February 2021. After removing duplicates, 189 articles were screened and 23 empirical articles were included in this review study. All study populations were from North America and the mean race/ethnicity distribution was 6.9% for non-Hispanic Negroes and 4.5% for Hispanic.Health outcomes were categorized as health care utilization, patient-reported outcomes, chronic health problems, and survival status.We found robust evidence of racial/ethnic differences across four domains of health outcome.However, the health differences were explained by clinical factors (e.g. diagnosis, treatment), demographic (e.g. age d, gender), socioeconomic status at the individual level (SES; e.g., education level, personal income, health insurance), family level SES (e.g., family income, parental education level), neighborhood level (e.g., geographic location), and lifestyle health risk (e.g., cardiovascular risk) in some, but not all articles. We discuss the importance of collecting comprehensive social determinants of racial/ethnic inequalities, including SES at the individual, family and neighborhood levels.”

According to the news editors, the study concluded: “We propose integrating these variables into healthcare systems (e.g., electronic health records) and using information technology and analytics to better understand the racial/ethnic minority inequality gap of childhood cancer survivors. In addition, we propose national and local efforts to close the gap by improving access to health insurance, education and transportation assistance, racial culture-specific social learning interventions, and diversity-based training.

For more information on this study, see: Racial and Ethnic Inequalities in Health Outcomes in Long-Term Childhood Cancer Survivors: A Scoping Review. Limits in public health, 2021,9. (Frontiers in Public Health – http://journal.frontiersin.org/journal/public-health). The publisher for Frontiers in Public Health is Frontiers Media SA

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.741334.

Our news reporters report that additional information can be obtained by contacting Tegan J. Reeves, Department of Epidemiology and Cancer Control, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, United States. Other authors for this study are Taylor J. Mathis, Hailey E. Bauer, Melissa M. Hudson, Leslie L. Robison, Zhaoming Wang, Justin N. Baker, I-Chan Huang.

(Our reports provide fact-based news about research and discoveries from around the world.)