Dr. Singla on race-specific outcomes for renal cell carcinoma

In this video, Nirmish Singla, MD, MSc, describes the background for the recent Urologic Oncology paper, “Socioeconomic determinants of racial disparities in survival outcomes among patients with renal cell carcinoma.” Singla is an associate professor of urology and oncology in the Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins University

Transcription:

Please describe the background for this study.

In general, race-specific outcomes can be very challenging to study given that they're very complex. And there are oftentimes many factors that come into play when looking at outcomes. Aside from, for example, inherent biologically driven differences that might exist among races, socioeconomic disparities also can play significant roles in driving discrepant outcomes. These include things such as, for example, access to care and even cultural differences that may influence trust in the health care system at large. In oncology, this can be particularly evident, especially since access to adequate resources and sometimes to multidisciplinary care teams can be critical. In kidney cancer, the impact of race on outcomes has not really been well studied, unfortunately, and many of the published studies are somewhat inconsistent with one another. Unfortunately, African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities are grossly underrepresented in clinical studies, trials, and even in some molecular studies in kidney cancer, which can often limit the generalizability of the findings. And so then the goal of our work, essentially, was to leverage a national population-based cancer registry to comprehensively analyze multiple socioeconomic determinants of racial disparities and survival outcomes among nearly 400,000 patients with renal cell carcinoma or RCC, which is the most common form of kidney cancer.

This transcript was edited for clarity.