Reducing Racial Disparities in Surviving Gastrointestinal Cancer Will Require Looking Beyond the Fact That African-Americans Have Low Rates of Surgery.

This article by Bliton and colleagues in this issue of the journal concludes that disproportionately low surgery rates among Black patients contribute to the known survival disparity between Blacks and Whites. Using data from the National Cancer Database (NCDB), they were able to address the implicit hypothesis that the measured outcome disparities are partly attributable to failure to deliver surgical care equitably. As with most good research on difficult and complex topics, it also raises interesting and provocative questions about the role of race in poor survival among African-American patients with gastrointestinal cancer. The main limitation of the NCDB is its inability to account for individual-level factors. Those things related to health behaviors, such as diet, physical activity, and tobacco use, but that also include characteristics of the built environment, comprehensive access to care measures, clinical decision-making, racial discrimination and other forms of psychosocial stress, and environmental contamination, would influence both the likelihood of getting cancer and the probability of having aggressive disease with poor prognosis. These factors also may be related to clinical decision-making. Suggestions are made to design studies and collect data that would help to inform future investigations to deepen our understanding of racial disparities in cancer survival.