Racial disparities persist in U.S. cancer treatment

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. blacks continue to get inferior cancer treatment compared to whites, researchers said on Monday in a study showing that disparities first documented in the early 1990s persist despite efforts to erase them.

The researchers assessed the type of treatment given to more than 143,000 Americans over age 65 for lung, breast, colon, rectal and prostate cancer from 1992 to 2002 under the Medicare government health insurance program.

Black patients were consistently less likely than whites to receive the recommended types of treatment, the study found, and the problem was just as bad in 2002 as in 1992.

The findings were published in the journal Cancer, published by the American Cancer Society.

"What we found was that the racial disparities did not change during that 10-year time interval," Dr. Cary Gross of the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Despite the publication of studies in the early 1990s documenting the disparities and despite steps taken by some doctors and hospitals to understand and address the problem, the study found little in the way of progress.

The reasons for racial disparities in cancer care and many other areas of health care in the United States remain a contentious issue that touches on the question of whether outright racism exists in the U.S. medical system.

"This sort of thing has been a problem in the United States for a long, long time," Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said in a telephone interview.