Insurance Sways Risk of Cancer Diagnosis - NYTimes.com

Scientists have long known that increasing age is the strongest risk for a diagnosis of late-stage cervical cancer. Now a new study suggests that the next strongest risk is the patient?s insurance status.

Survival is strongly related to the stage at which cervical cancer is diagnosed. Women with early, localized lesions have five-year survival rates of 91.2 percent; just 17 percent of those with advanced, distant disease survive that long.

Researchers writing online last week in The American Journal of Public Health studied 69,739 women with invasive cervical cancer recorded in a national database from 2000 to 2007. About half were privately insured, 10 percent uninsured, and the rest insured by Medicare or Medicaid.

Women age 50 and older were more than twice as likely as those ages 21 to 34 to have advanced disease, the researchers found. Uninsured patients of any age were 44 percent more likely than the insured to have advanced illness.

Medicaid patients were about 37 percent more likely to have late-stage disease than other patients. Race and ethnicity had little effect on the results.

?Deficient screening history or lack of screening are likely to explain these results,? said the study?s lead author, Stacey A. Fedewa, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society. ?Trying to remove barriers to women getting preventive care is the big thing.?

Source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/insurance-sways-risk-of-cancer-diagnosis/

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