AACR Report Highlights Disparities in Cancer Care

Black women are 40% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Hispanic people are more than twice as likely to die from stomach cancer. People who live in nonmetropolitan or rural counties are 38% more likely to die from lung cancer, compared to those who live in large metropolitan or urban areas.

These disparities and others are highlighted in the American Association for Cancer Research’s 2024 Cancer Disparities Progress Report. The biennial report details cancer disparities faced by racial and ethnic minority groups and calls for solutions to reduce these inequalities in underserved populations in the United States.

While the overall cancer death rate in the U.S. fell by 33% between 1991 and 2020 thanks to advances in prevention, early detection and treatment, those advances have not benefited everyone equally.

Matthew Schabath, MD

“This report details how preventable and modifiable cancer risk factors (such as poor diet, smoking, pathogenic infections, obesity, etc.) and environmental factors (such as air pollution) are often intersectional with population demographics, especially underserved and minoritized populations, and further exacerbate cancer disparities,” said Matthew Schabath, PhD, co-leader of the Cancer Epidemiology Program at Moffitt Cancer Center, who sat on the report’s steering committee. “It highlights how cancer disparities occur across the entire cancer continuum from prevention, early detection, diagnosis, access to treatment and survivorship care.”

The report explores the roots of the inequalities, including social drivers of health (education level, income, employment, housing, access to health care), ancestry-related biological factors and underrepresentation of minority groups in clinical trials.

It also calls on policymakers and other stakeholders to help eliminate cancer disparities by providing more funding to programs tasked with reducing these disparities, increasing access to clinical trials, enacting comprehensive legislation and prioritizing cancer screening initiatives. 

Here are some of the report’s key findings:

• Although cancer incidence rates among Black and Indigenous populations are lower than the white population, Black and Indigenous people have the highest cancer death rates of all racial or ethnic groups in the U.S.
  • Black men are twice as likely to die from prostate cancer compared to white men.
  • Black women have a 40% higher likelihood of dying from breast cancer than white women.
  • Black individuals are twice as likely to be diagnosed with and die from multiple myeloma.
• American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Hispanic people are more than twice as likely to die from stomach cancer compared to white people.
• Lung cancer incidence is rising among Asian women who have never smoked.
• Residents of nonmetropolitan or rural counties were 38% more likely to be diagnosed with and die from lung cancer, compared to those who live in large metropolitan or urban areas.
• Risk of breast cancer is higher among sexual minority women compared to heterosexual women.
  • Transgender individuals are at a 76% higher risk of being diagnosed with advanced-stage lung cancer compared to cisgender individuals.
  • While transgender women appear to be at a 60% lower risk of developing prostate cancer than cisgender men, their likelihood of dying from it is nearly double.