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).
Mark J. Levis, MD, PhD, of The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University, discusses the effect of gilteritinib on survival in patients with FLT3-mutated relapsed/refractory AML who have common co-mutations or a high FLT3-ITD allelic ratio, and the importance of FLT3-ITD testing at diagnosis and again at relapse (Abstract 7000).
Edward B. Garon, MD, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, discusses long-term survival data on patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer treated with pembrolizumab and those with PD-L1 expressed in at least half of their tumor cells (Abstract LBA9015).
Sara A. Hurvitz, MD, of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses the first study of ribociclib plus endocrine therapy vs endocrine therapy alone to demonstrate significantly longer overall survival in peri- and premenopausal women with advanced breast cancer (Abstract LBA1008).
Sagar Lonial, MD, of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, discusses the potentially practice-changing phase III findings showing that lenalidomide substantially delayed progression of smoldering multiple myeloma to aggressive disease when compared with observation alone (Abstract 8001).
Rowan T. Chlebowski, MD, PhD, of the Los Angeles BioMedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, discusses study findings from nearly 2 decades of data, which showed a 21% reduction in deaths from breast cancer among postmenopausal women who adhered to a low-fat diet (Abstract 520).
