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Racial and regional disparities in deaths in breast cancer

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A Letter to the Editor to this article was published on 06 November 2023

Abstract

Breast cancer is the second most diagnosed malignancy in American women with a lifetime occurrence of 1 in 8 women in the United States. There has been a dearth of research focusing on regional differences in breast cancer mortality with respect to race in the US. It is crucial to identify regions that are lagging to uplift the outreach of breast cancer care to certain races. Data for this study were obtained from the 2016–2018 Nationwide Inpatient Sample. In-hospital mortality, race and hospital regions for the patients with the primary diagnosis of Malignant Neoplasms of Breast were studied. Baseline characteristics of participants were summarized using descriptive statistics. The patient population was stratified as per race, hospital region, gender, therapy received and family history. Logistic regression was performed to derive the odds ratio while adjusting for different variables. 99, 543 patients with metastatic breast cancer were identified. African Americans (AAs) were found to have the highest reported deaths at 5.54%, followed by Asians and Pacific Islanders at 4.80% and Caucasians 4.09% (p < 0.0001). The odds of dying were significantly higher in the AA population when compared to Caucasian population (OR 1.391 (1.286–1.504)), and the odds were consistently higher across all regions of the US. In terms of regional disparities with respect to race, AA’s had highest mortality in the south whereas all other races had the highest mortality in the west. It was seen that races identifying as “others” had significantly higher odds of dying in the Northeast. It is crucial to identify racial differences in the various regions across the US in order to implement appropriate outreach strategies to tackle these disparities.

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Acknowledgements

This data has previously been presented as an Abstract at ASCO Annual Meeting 2022.

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The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Internal Medicine, Crozer-Chester Medical Center, 1 Medical Center Blvd, Upland, PA, USA

    Akshita Khosla, Sachi Singhal & Aanchal Sawhney

  2. Department of Palliative Care, Einstein Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Devashish Desai

  3. Department of Hematology-Oncology, Crozer-Chester Medical Center, Upland, PA, USA

    Rashmika Potdar

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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by DD. The first draft of the manuscript was written by AK and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Akshita Khosla.

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Khosla, A., Desai, D., Singhal, S. et al. Racial and regional disparities in deaths in breast cancer. Med Oncol 40, 210 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12032-023-02083-w

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