Investigators have demonstrated that the socioeconomic status of cell donors may impact the health outcomes of patients with hematologic malignancies who undergo hematopoietic cell transplantation, according to a recent study published by Turcotte et al in PNAS.
Study Methods and Results
In the recent study, the investigators analyzed the health outcomes of 2,005 patients with hematologic malignancies who had undergone hematopoietic cell transplantation across 125 hospitals in the United States.
After a follow-up of 3 years, the investigators discovered that the patients who received transplanted cells from donors with the greatest socioeconomic disadvantages experienced a 9.7% reduction in overall survival and 6.6% increase in transplant-related mortality compared with those who received transplanted cells from donors with high socioeconomic status. The results persisted regardless of the patient's socioeconomic status.
Conclusions
The findings showed the biological impact of social disadvantages and how the factor may alter health outcomes, specifically in the setting of cancer and hematopoietic cell transplantation.
The investigators plan to conduct further studies exploring the underlying biological and physiologic drivers of the association in order to develop interventions to mitigate the adverse health outcomes introduced by socioeconomic disadvantages.
“Our findings are quite remarkable. We have shown that social disadvantage penetrates so deeply that it is actually transplantable into a new host, and its effects persist over time,” underscored lead study author Lucie Turcotte, MD, MPH, MS, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Director of the Masonic Cancer Center’s Cancer Survivorship Services and Translational Research program, and a pediatric hematologist and oncologist at M Health Fairview. “The importance of these findings reaches far beyond cancer and bone marrow transplant care; they demonstrate the profound health effects of social inequality and highlight the critical need for public health interventions,” she concluded.
Disclosure: The research in this study was funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health. For full disclosures of the study authors, visit pnas.org.
