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).
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).
Toni K. Choueiri, MD, and Sarah Abou Alaiwi, MD, both of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discuss the association of polybromo-associated BAF-type mutations with overall survival in patients with different solid tumors treated with checkpoint inhibitors (Abstract 103).
Neeraj Agarwal, MD, of Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah Health Care, and Thomas W. Flaig, MD, of the University of Colorado, discuss phase II findings on a novel predictive biomarker of response to the two accepted neoadjuvant regimens for muscle-invasive bladder cancer: methotrexate/vinblastine/doxorubicin/cisplatin and gemcitabine/cisplatin (Abstract 4506).
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).
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).
