The finding is partially but not wholly explained by socioeconomic status, meaning that in addition to the health risks associated with low socioeconomic status or stage of presentation, there are additional health risks associated specifically with these racial/ethnic identities.
"As with many disparities, you have to identify the problem before you can fix it," says Meryl Colton, MS, medical student at University of Colorado School of Medicine, who performed the analysis with Adam L. Green, MD, investigator at the CU Cancer Center and pediatric oncologist at Children's Hospital Colorado.
The study used data from the National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database to compare the overall rate of death in the two years following cancer diagnosis for the three above-mentioned racial/ethnic groups, as well as people with Medicaid or no insurance compared to private insurance. For example, taking the chance of a young-adult white patient dying within two years of being diagnosed with liver cancer as a baseline of "1", the chance of a similar Hispanic white patient dying is 1.77 and a non-Hispanic black patient's chance of dying is 1.76.