VIDEO: Addressing disparities in care among patients with endometrial cancer

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Again, I think educating communities and providers that ultrasound is not sufficient as far evaluating somebody for endometrial cancer. Ultrasound needs to be combined with biopsy results and we need to make sure that patients are seen by a gynecologist. Oftentimes, they might be seen only by their internist and start with an ultrasound. If the ultrasound looks normal, it doesn't show any obvious abnormality, there may not be sufficient follow up.

The other thing that is important to recognize is that the abnormal bleeding we see is not often continuous. A woman might present with one episode of spotting, two episodes of spotting and it self resolves and sometimes there's an inclination to say that if it's self resolved, it must not be important but in fact, that's not true. We oftentimes, we'll see women have one sentinel bleeding event, nothing afterwards for a long time and then the fact that it resolved leads to a delay in diagnosis because the assumption is that if it resolved then it must have been a self-limited process. Fortunately, most endometrial cancers are low grade tumors and they generally are relatively slow growing and so we are able to catch most of these at early stage. It's harder for patients who have the higher grade histologies. Those tend to be more aggressive malignancies, more likely metastasize from a an early diagnosis point of view, catching those tumors at early stage really is about having a very timely recognition of an abnormal change in bleeding pattern and diagnosing it early.