Amy J. Davidoff, PhD, on Racial Disparities in Time to Cancer Treatment: The Effect of Medicaid Expansion
2019 ASCO Annual Meeting
Amy J. Davidoff, PhD, of Yale University School of Public Health, discusses study findings on how expanding access to Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) reduced racial disparities among patients with advanced cancer. Before the ACA was implemented in 2014, black patients with cancer were less likely than white patients to receive timely treatment, but in states that did not adopt Medicaid expansion, racial disparities persist (Abstract LBA1).
Karim Fizazi, MD, PhD, of the Institut Gustave Roussy, University of Paris-Sud, discusses study findings showing that not only does darolutamide prolong metastasis-free survival, it maintains quality of life as well as delays worsening of pain and disease-related symptoms compared with placebo for patients with nonmetastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (Abstract 5000).
Åsmund A. Fretland, MD, of Oslo University Hospital, discusses clinical trial findings on survival outcomes after laparoscopic vs open resection for colorectal liver metastases. The study he conducted with his team showed that the laparoscopic procedure did not jeopardize long-term survival (Abstract LBA3516).
Jonathan E. Rosenberg, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses results from the phase III Alliance trial, which showed that adding bevacizumab to gemcitabine and cisplatin did not improve overall survival in patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma, but did improve progression-free survival (Abstract 4503).
Toni K. Choueiri, MD, and Ziad Bakouny, MD, both of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discuss a retrospective review of genomically profiled patients with sarcomatoid/rhabdoid renal cell cancer who were found to have better outcomes with immune checkpoint inhibitors and to harbor mutations associated with poor prognosis (Abstract 4514).
Javier Sastre, MD, PhD, of Hospital Clinico San Carlos, discusses phase III findings on the assessment of circulating tumor cells as a prognostic factor and FOLFOXIRI plus bevacizumab combination outcomes for patients with poor-prognosis colorectal cancer (Abstract 3507).