VIDEO: Racial disparities in access to care, diagnostic delay in endometrial cancer

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript, which has been slightly edited for clarity. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Unfortunately, we know that there are very clear racial disparities in endometrial cancer, both initial access to care, delays in diagnosis and treatment, and worse outcomes, particularly in Black women. There are many people who are working hard to understand and address these disparities. Dr Kemi Doll in particular, has really extensive research on these delays in access to care and diagnosis. For instance, work has been done to show that Black women who more commonly have fibroids may have a delay in diagnosis because thickened endometrium and postmenopausal patients more than four millimeters may not be visualized in women that have fibroids, it may be distorted.

Additionally, in Black women in particular, they are at more high risk of the more high-risk histology, it’s high-grade serous endometrial cancer clear cell and those actually typically present without a thickened endometrium, those histologies present with an atrophic, thin endometrium, so that use of just a thickened endometrium on an ultrasound doesn't actually apply to Black patients for having a high concern for an underlying cancer. Additionally, we do know that the impact of race and/or racism in medicine directly affects people’s recurrence risks, treatment and mortality. So, there is much work being done in the GYN-oncology community, in the medical oncology community to address these racial disparities, especially as it comes to the mortality that we see for Black women.