DUARTE, Calif., January 25, 2010 — City of Hope researchers found that even when liver cancer patients received comparable levels of treatment, African-American patients have worse survival rates than patients of other races. Joseph Kim, M.D., assistant professor of surgery, City of Hope, led two analyses of data – one of more than 20,000 patients diagnosed with liver cancer from 1973 to 2004, and the second of more than 4,000 patients whose cancer was treated through liver transplantation from 1987 to 2008 – in an effort to identify potential causes of the disparity in outcomes. Their findings are published online in advance of print in CANCER, the journal of the American Cancer Society.

“Our hypothesis was that differences in access to care may have led to the drastic differences in survivorship, but we still found disparate outcomes by race even with equal treatment,” said Kim.

The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 22,000 people were diagnosed with liver cancer in the past year and more than 18,000 died from the disease. Kim found that overall survival rates for liver cancer patients have improved over the years, which may be attributable to advances in surgical technique, newly developed targeted therapies and increased use of liver transplantation to treat early stage tumors.

Study findings revealed that African-American patients had a 15 percent increased risk of death compared to Caucasian patients. Asian-American patients had a 13 percent reduced risk of death compared to Caucasian patients. Data confirmed that socioeconomic status and race were factors in access to appropriate care and resulting survival rates.

Kim also analyzed more than 4,000 records of liver cancer patients who received liver transplants as treatment to assess how races fared with comparable care. African-Americans had the worst post-transplantation outcomes, with a median survival of 30.5 months. Caucasian patients had a median survival of 63.8 months, Asian-Americans had 69.7 months and Hispanics had 82.4 months.

“It is clear that access, while still an important factor, is not the primary factor in the outcome disparities we see among the different racial and ethnic groups,” said Kim. “What we are learning is that in addition to providing the best treatment, we also need to pay more attention to post-treatment variables in our overall survivorship care.”

Kim is continuing research into the disparities with a study to determine the role of genetic factors in the different outcomes.