VIDEO: Historically redlined areas linked to worse breast cancer outcomes
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CHICAGO — Living in a formerly redlined census tract at the time of diagnosis was linked with worse all-cause and breast cancer mortality, according to a poster presented at ASCO Annual Meeting.
“We had interest in looking at the impact or the link between historical redlining and [breast cancer] survival by using the SEER Medicare database,” Jean C. Bikomeye, MPH, a PhD candidate in the public and community health program at Medical College of Wisconsin, told Healio.
“What we are finding is that women who resided in historically redlined areas have poor survival, compared with women who resided in historically non-redlined areas,” he said. “This association remains even after adjusting for patient characteristics and tumor-specific characteristics.”
Bikomeye and colleagues defined redlined areas by linking historic Home Owners’ Loan Corporation boundaries from the 1930s with census data from 2010 and the SEER Medicare breast cancer cohort.
The researchers found that of 10,113 women included in the study, 62.8% lived in areas that were historically redlined.
During the mean follow-up period of 48.5 months, 28.9% of patients were deceased, 41.6% of whom died from breast cancer.
The researchers found that, compared with women who did not live in historically redlined areas, women who lived in historically redlined areas experienced worse breast cancer survival rates.
They determined that living in a historically redlined area was still an independent predictor of an increased risk for all-cause mortality (HR = 1.11; 95% CI; 1.02-1.2) and breast cancer mortality (HR = 1.24; 95% CI, 1.011-1.39).
Bikomeye explained that the findings are important to policymakers and clinicians, and that it can help them “think broadly about what we can do as a society to really take a look at this deep root cause of inequalities so that we can improve health equity across the spectrum, regardless of where people grew up.”
At the time of ASCO, the full study was under review for publication.
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