NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Americans with cancer of the liver are less likely than whites to get a transplant for the disease, according to us researchers.
And this gap has not changed in a decade, they report in the journal of Cancer.
"This treatment is expensive, high technology and rising - just the kind of storm that leads to a disparity in care," said study investigator Dr. Anthony Robbins, the American Cancer Society, who called the liver transplant "a new lease on life."
Liver cancer is a brutal disease, let alone seven Americans in alive five years after it was diagnosed.
About one in 100 men to the United States develop cancer at some point, while women are less than half more likely to do so, according to the American Cancer Society.
The new study, Robbins and her colleagues from the records of U.S. hospitals on more than 7 700 patients with liver cancer diagnosed between 1998 and 2007.
All the patients in the study had the form the most common disease, known as hepatocellular carcinoma, which affects 80% of all patients with liver cancer. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, liver hepatitis b and c infections are behind most of the cases of this type of cancer.
The researchers found that, in the course of the first half of the study, white patients liver cancer had a 30 percent chance of receiving a new liver, compared to only 15 percent for blacks.
While opportunities has increased somewhat over the next five years, disparities remained. Taking into account how long patients are dead - some might be dead before they could get a new liver, for example - blacks were less likely than whites to undergo surgery by 36%.
They were also more likely to die within five years of their diagnosis of 36%. Black once received on a transplant waiting list, however, the gap closed and they face the same chances of survival than whites.
Robbins, said the medical community has known for years on inequality in care between black and white.
"After intense effort to try to fix things and a lot of thought and sensitivity to this issue, the gap has not disappeared," he said.
Although there are probably several reasons for the disparity, Robbins added, "the greatest motivation is the difference in access to care in the early stages of the disease by health insurance." And that must change. ?
The average cost of surgery more first year medical costs amounts to $ 450,000.
The study also compared Asian and Hispanic whites.
There was little difference in the number of liver transplants between whites and Hispanics. Asians were 19% of chance to get a new liver in the first half of the study and a chance to 24 per cent in the next five years.
While it was much lower that the whites, their illness tended to be less devastating and probably did not require a transplant in the first place, researchers say.
Dr. Andre Dick, transplant surgeon at Seattle Children's Hospital who was not involved in the study, said that the new research is important.
"It makes people aware that it is no longer in the queue which is important and this is where the actual disparities are still showing," he told Reuters Health. "And how the question is, how overcome them us?".
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