Disparities Exist in Younger Adults With GI Cancers

There are socioeconomic and ethnic disparities in young adults who receive a diagnosis of colorectal and gastric cancers, according to Amir Khan, MD, from City of Hope.

Khan recently examined cancer data from more than 100,000 patients in the state of California.

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One of the first things was that the ethnic and socioeconomic disparities that we noted. The Hispanic ethnicity was much more common in the younger population. In the group that was aged 65 to 90 [years old,] maybe about 20% of gastric cancers were among Hispanics, as opposed to the 18 to 40 group, [where] 50% of patients were Hispanic.

We also found that these younger patients were more likely to be uninsured and of low socioeconomic status. We found that these patients may present with later disease, stage III, stage IV disease, and they had certain histopathologic features that suggested a more aggressive disease process. They had more poorly differentiated tumors. In terms of gastric cancer, they had diffuse-type pathology, and poorly differentiated tumors as well.