SAN DIEGO – African Americans and Asian Americans with hepatocellular carcinoma had significantly worse inpatient mortality than did white patients, and the data suggest that socioeconomic disparities in availability of health services may at least partially explain the difference.
In a multivariate analysis that also applied propensity-score matching, African American inpatients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) were 30% more likely to die, compared with their white counterparts, and Asian Americans had a 60% higher inpatient mortality, compared with white Americans who had HCC.
Dr. Sabeen F. Medvedev
The findings were based on data collected from 27,741 patients during 2002-2011 by the University Health Consortium, Dr. Sabeen F. Medvedev said at the the annual Digestive Disease Week.
The data analyzed by Dr. Medvedev and her associates showed a broad range of disparities by racial and ethnic groups for type of medical coverage, disease severity at the time of hospitalization, presence of metastatic disease, and whether patients received invasive treatment or liver transplantation.
"Despite increased survival due to advances in surveillance and surgical interventions for HCC, we found racial disparities exist in prognosis and disease presentation," said Dr. Medvedev of the division of gastroenterology and liver diseases at the George Washington University in Washington.
After propensity scores to mimic randomization of treatment options were used, a 60% excess mortality in African Americans, compared with whites, was reduced to a 30% excess, "indicating that the observed disparity in deaths might extend beyond disproportionate treatment allocation. The take home message is, due to their insurance and economic status and lack of access to care, African Americans did not have as many treatment options," Dr. Medvedev said. "We think that this is a delivery-of-care issue," she added in an interview.
The University Health Consortium includes 116 U.S. academic medical centers and 272 of their affiliated hospitals – about 90% of America’s nonprofit academic medical centers. HCC patients who were treated during the 9 years studied had a median age of 61 years; 54% of them were white, 16% were African American, 11% Asian, 9% Hispanic, and 10% were from other ethnic groups.
The white subgroup had the highest percentage of patients with private medical insurance (41%) and the lowest rate of Medicaid or uninsured status (15%). In contrast, among African Americans, 30% had private insurance, and 37% received Medicaid or were uninsured. Among Asian Americans, 38% had private insurance, and 30% had Medicaid or were uninsured.
An analysis of disease presentation and treatments applied showed that the African American and Asian American subgroups each had a 20% higher rate of HCC metastasis at the time of hospitalization, compared with the white subgroup.
African Americans also received significantly fewer liver transplants, resections, ablations, and transarterial chemoembolizations, compared with the white subgroup. Asian Americans received significantly fewer transarterial chemoembolizations, compared with whites, but their rates for other types of treatments were similar to the rates seen in the white subgroup. The only treatment received significantly less often by Hispanic patients, compared with whites, was resection.
Dr. Medvedev said that she had no disclosures.