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).
Jason Westin, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses findings of the Smart Start study on the chemotherapy-free combination of rituximab, lenalidomide, and ibrutinib in newly diagnosed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (Abstract 7508).
Suresh S. Ramalingam, MD, of Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University, discusses findings from the ECOG-ACRIN 5508 study, which showed that single-agent bevacizumab or pemetrexed is the optimal maintenance therapy for advanced nonsquamous NSCLC (Abstract 9002).
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).
Richard L. Schilsky, MD, of ASCO, and R. Donald Harvey, PharmD, BCOP, of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, discuss their study findings that expanding the clinical trial eligibility criteria for patients with advanced NSCLC would enable nearly twice as many people to be considered for participation (Abstract LBA108).
Neeraj Agarwal, MD, of Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah Health Care, and Thomas Powles, MD, PhD, of Queen Mary University of London, discuss phase III study findings on outcomes with combination therapy for intermediate/poor-risk and sarcomatoid subgroups of renal cell carcinoma (Abstract 4500).