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).
Angela Lamarca, MD, PhD, of The Christie NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Manchester, discusses phase III findings from a multicenter study of active symptom control alone or active symptom control with oxaliplatin and fluorouracil for patients with locally advanced or metastatic biliary tract cancers previously treated with cisplatin and gemcitabine (Abstract 4003).
Kamran A. Ahmed, MD, of the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, reports on a trial in progress that is investigating whether treatment with atezolizumab plus hypofractionated radiation therapy will improve the objective response rate compared with atezolizumab alone in patients with recurrent, persistent, or metastatic cervical cancer (Abstract TPS5596).
Gilberto Lopes, MD, MBA, of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami, offers commentary on phase III findings from the RELAY study, which showed that erlotinib plus ramucirumab led to superior progression-free survival in previously untreated patients with EGFR mutant–positive NSCLC (Abstract 9000).
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).
Matt D. Galsky, MD, of The Tisch Cancer Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, discusses phase II study findings that show switch maintenance with pembrolizumab significantly improves progression-free survival in the metastatic setting (Abstract 4504).
