Blacks more likely to refuse elective lung cancer surgery & results are surprising
January 21, 2009 by Marijke Durning, RN
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
When you are given the option of having surgery for a cancer to improve your chances of beating it, you would think that knowingly refusing the surgery could have dire consequences. But, sometimes that may not be so.
According to an article published in last month’s issue of Archives of Surgery, only 69% of blacks who had operable lung cancer went ahead with the surgery, while 83% of whites did. This wasn’t due to lack of accessibility, as both groups were equal in healthcare access.
Although the author admits that there may be some issues with the way the study was adjusted to make the groups even and other issues affecting the lungs weren’t taken into consideration. However, that being said – there was still a surprising finding that there was no difference between the death and survival rate between the two groups, even though blacks had the lower surgery rate.
It will be interesting to see what future studies say when they try to prove or disprove this finding.
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Tags: cancer blog, lung cancer, operable lung cancer
