Many blacks miss therapy for rectal cancer

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Blacks with rectal cancer are 23 percent less likely to get chemotherapy than whites, even when they see a cancer specialist, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

They also found that blacks were 12 percent less likely to get radiation therapy than whites. The study is the latest to show that blacks in the United States get less treatment for cancer than whites and are more apt to die from their cancers.

Both blacks and whites in the study saw cancer specialists at about the same rate, suggesting that reasons other than access to a specialist may be playing a role.

The finding came as a surprise to Dr. Arden Morris, a surgeon at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, who had expected to find blacks were not being referred to a cancer specialist after surgery as often as whites.

"I assumed they weren't getting recommendations," said Morris, whose study appears in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Blacks are about 20 percent less likely to survive rectal cancers long term after surgery and the researchers were trying to see if lack of referrals was a factor.

Morris and colleagues studied Medicare records from 1992 to 1999 of elderly patients who had undergone surgery for rectal cancer. They collected data on age, gender, race and the use of a follow-up therapy such as radiation or chemotherapy.

They found no significant difference between the two groups in terms of how frequently they had consulted a cancer specialist.