Colon Cancer Worse in African-Americans

African-American colorectal cancer patients do worse than Caucasian ones, U.S. researchers found.

African-American patients are more likely to have worse pathological features at diagnosis and to have a worse five-year survival rate compared to Caucasian patients. Among patients diagnosed with early-stage disease, the risk for nodal involvement was also greater in African-American patients.

"Right now, we cannot definitely explain why there are such differences between the African-American and the Caucasian patients," study leader Dr. Edith Mitchell of Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University said in a statement.

Mitchell suggests one possible explanation is socioeconomic factors.

"For example, research has shown that African-Americans are less likely than Caucasian patients to have health insurance, and thus they may not receive the screening necessary to detect colorectal cancer at an earlier stage," Mitchell says in a statement.

The study is based on data from the tumor registry of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital on 2,500 colorectal cancer patients treated from 1988 to 2007, and on data from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database on 244,701 colorectal cancer patients treated from 1988 to 2005.

The findings are being presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium in Orlando, Fla.