Socioeconomic disparities affect survival in renal cell carcinoma

In this video, Nirmish Singla, MD, MSc, shares notable findings from 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 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Transcription:

What were some of the notable findings? Were any of them surprising to you and your coauthors?

We started first off by analyzing all comers with RCC, and we stratified the population by essentially African American race vs Caucasian race. And then we went on and performed some additional sub analyses that were matched by stage. This included, on one end of the spectrum, patients who had non-metastatic small renal masses. And then on the complete other end of the spectrum, we also looked at patients who were diagnosed with metastatic disease at presentation. Then we also did some sub analyses by histologic subtypes in RCC. These included patients with clear cell RCC, which is the most common subtype of RCC, and also papillary RCC, which, interestingly, proportionately seems to affect African Americans at a higher rate compared with their Caucasian counterparts. And so overall, what we had found from our analysis was that African American patients with RCC seem to exhibit worse survival outcomes compared with Caucasian patients. And this was evident across all stages and histologies. And interestingly, also, this is despite the observation that African Americans were younger and also diagnosed at a relatively earlier stage. Furthermore, and what was striking about our study is that we also found that socioeconomic disparities, which disproportionately affected African American patients with kidney cancer, play an important role in impacting survival in RCC, and these are likely the factors that are driving inequalities in access to care and seem to be more magnified in patients who have advanced cases that would often benefit from this multidisciplinary expertise.

This transcript was edited for clarity.