Update from the 2009 Gastrointestinal Cancer Symposium

African Americans in both a large national database of colorectal cancer patients and in records of a Philadelphia hospital were more likely to be diagnosed at an advanced stage and have poorer survival at every stage than white patients.

Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadephia studied information from nearly 245,000 colon and rectal cancer patients from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. They compared that information to 20 years worth of data in the Jefferson University Hospital tumor registry for 2,500 patients treated from 1988 through 2007. Read the rest of this entry »

Although colorectal cancer death rates are falling for both whites and blacks in the United States, the decline is steeper for whites and the gap between races is growing.

A new  report from the American Cancer Society, Colorectal Cancer: Facts and Figures 2008-2010, finds that African American men and women are more likely than the rest of the U.S. population to get colon or rectal cancer and much more likely to die of it.  In 2005, the death rate for African Americans was 48 percent higher than that for whites.

Officials at the ACS attribute the difference to lower colorectal cancer screening rates, poorer insurance coverage, and fewer African Americans receiving recommended surgical and chemotherapy treatments.

Incidence and death rates for Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are lower than for white and the overall populations.

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Led by dropping rates of lung, breast, and colorectal cancer, the incidence rate of all new cancers in the United States is falling for the first time.  While overall cancer death rates have been decreasing since the early 1990′s, this is the first time that rates of new cancer diagnoses are also declining.

In the Annual Report to the Nation, the rate of newly diagnosed cancer fell 1.7 percent per year between 2001 and 2005.  Death rates for all cancers combined fell 1.8 percent annually during the same time period.

Both incidence of new colorectal cancers and colorectal cancer death rates continued to decline with the new report.  Between 1998 and 2005, incidence rates for men fell 3 percent annually while rates for women declined 2.4 percent.  Death rates fell 4.3 percent between 2002 and 2005 for both sexes.

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When African Americans hear a positive message that emphasizes progress being made for blacks with colon cancer, they are much more likely to want to be screened.  On the other hand, negative messages that talk about their poorer outcomes make them less willing to have screening tests.

Health communications researchers at St. Louis University asked 300 African-Americans to read one of four mock news articles about colorectal cancer, chosen randomly.  Three messages were negative, emphasizing differences from whites. One focused on the progress that blacks were making surviving colorectal cancer.

Participants who read the positive article had more positive emotional reactions and more often said they wanted to be screened.  The negative articles had the opposite effect. Read the rest of this entry »

Susan B. Komen for the Cure joined the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) to increase the number of minorities practicing oncology in the United States.  By recruiting and training more doctors as oncologists from groups underrepresented in medicine, they hope to improve cancer care for ethnically diverse patients. Read the rest of this entry »