What is happening with cancer among ethnic and racial groups?
Continued higher incidence and death rates among some racial and ethnic groups suggest that some populations may not have benefitted equally from cancer prevention and control efforts. Such disparities may be due to multiple factors, such as late stage of disease at diagnosis, barriers to health care access, history of other diseases, biologic and genetic differences in tumors, health behaviors, and the presence of risk factors. In April 2000, the NCI established Special Populations Networks which will distribute a total of $60 million in grants over 5 years to address some of these disparities. Additional efforts will be undertaken as part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Health Disparities Plan, with NCI responsible for the cancer-related issues. The four leading cancer incidence sites for the five racial and ethnic populations were: lung and bronchus, prostate, female breast, and colon/rectum. Together these four sites account for 54 percent of all new diagnoses. When thes
Continued higher incidence and death rates among some racial and ethnic groups suggest that not all populations have benefited equally from cancer prevention and treatment control efforts. Such disparities may be due to multiple factors, such as late stage of disease at diagnosis, barriers to health care access, history of other diseases, biologic and genetic differences in tumors, health behaviors, and the presence of risk factors.