Abstract
Background: The purpose of this study is to examine whether racial disparities in epithelial ovarian cancer stage at diagnosis and survival may be explained by geographic availability of healthcare resources among Blacks and Whites.
Methods: Data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database was used to identify White and Black women ages 40 years and above diagnosed with epithelial ovarian cancer between 2000 and 2010. Data on county-level availability of healthcare resources was obtained from the Area Resource File. Multi-level regression models, overall and stratified by race and age, were used to examine the associations of health care access (HCA) and socioeconomic status (SES) with stage at diagnosis while Cox proportional hazards models were used to examine the association with survival.
Results: Among 46,423 women diagnosed with epithelial ovarian cancer, Blacks were more likely to reside in counties with fewer average number of oncology hospitals (p < 0.05) and hospitals with ultrasound (p < 0.001), but higher number of medical doctors (p < 0.0001) and Ob/Gyn (p < 0.001). Black patients had higher odds of late stage diagnosis of epithelial ovarian cancer (OR: 1.13, 95% CI: 1.04–1.25) and higher risk of epithelial ovarian cancer mortality (HR: 1.25, 95% CI: 1.19–1.32) compared with White patients after accounting for differential availability of healthcare resources. Among Black patients, residing in counties with fewer medical doctors was associated with increased odds of late stage diagnosis (OR: 1.86, 95% CI: 1.10–3.13), and the racial disparity in late stage diagnosis and mortality was larger among patients ages < 65 years compared with older patients.
Cconclusion: Racial disparities in availability and utilization of healthcare resources likely contributes to adverse epithelial ovarian cancer outcomes among Black women in the US.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-22-2017
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13048-017-0352-1
Related Content
The datasets analyzed during the current study are available in the SEER repository, and can be obtained from: https://seer.cancer.gov. Data on county level healthcare resources was obtained from the Area Health Resource File (AHRF) developed by the U.S Health Resources and Services Administration. Details can be obtained from: http://ahrf.hrsa.gov.
Repository Citation
Sakhuja, Swati; Yun, Huifeng; Pisu, Maria; and Akinyemiju, Tomi, "Availability of Healthcare Resources and Epithelial Ovarian Cancer Stage of Diagnosis and Mortality Among Blacks and Whites" (2017). Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications. 23.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/epidemiology_facpub/23
Included in
Epidemiology Commons, Health Services Research Commons, Obstetrics and Gynecology Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Women's Health Commons
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Journal of Ovarian Research, v. 10, 57, p. 1-10.
© The Author(s). 2017
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.