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).
Daniel P. Petrylak, MD, of Yale School of Medicine, discusses study results on enfortumab vedotin monotherapy for locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer previously treated with platinum and immune checkpoint inhibitors (Abstract LBA4505).
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).
Ahmad A. Tarhini, MD, PhD, of Emory University and Winship Cancer Institute, discusses phase III findings from the U.S. Intergroup E1609 trial, which showed survival benefits for patients with resected high-risk melanoma—for the first time in the history of melanoma adjuvant therapy (Abstract 9504).
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).
Danny Rischin, MD, of Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, discusses phase III results that support pembrolizumab with and without platinum-based chemotherapy plus fluorouracil as new first-line standards of care for recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (Abstract 6000).