Dr John Schorge Discusses Disparities in Care of Endometrial Cancer

John Schorge, MD, associate editor of The Green Journal, and Gynecologic Oncologist at Tufts Medical Center, discusses his research on the disparities in the care of endometrial cancer.

Transcript

What sort of disparities did your research uncover about the receipt of care for high-grade endometrial cancer?

High-grade endometrial cancer is sort of the atypical version of endometrial cancer. Endometrial cancer has doubled in incidence in the United States in the last 20 years. The reason for that is the obesity epidemic, by and large, but most of those people are cured. It's the people with the high-grade or so-called type 2 endometrial cancers that require something other than surgery and have a much higher relapse rate.

So, even though it's 5% of people being diagnosed, it accounts for more than half of people that die from endometrial cancer. It seems to be shifted in the minority and non-classic populations.

For example, black women are more at risk for fibroids. They're also more at risk for some of these type 2 or high-grade endometrial cancers. So it's looking at the different health disparities and you would think that if there is 100 people with the same diagnosis that they would be treated the same way, with one of these more aggressive type of tumors. But that's not the case. And so, there are certain ethnic groups or race groups that tend to be under-treated for some reason or another.

Sometimes it's related to their insurance status, sometimes it's related to different philosophy, but that's what we were trying to drill down into.