The recent efforts to close the gaps in therapy for various kinds of cancer between Black and White Medicare patients have failed, a Yale University study released this week found.

A group of researchers from the Yale School of Medicine sought to determine whether the racial disparities in cancer therapy had diminished since they were originally recognized in the early 1990s. They used the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Medicare database to evaluate patients who had been diagnosed with prostate, breast, colorectal and lung cancer between 1992 and 2002 and still found glaring racial gaps in cancer care.

“Efforts to mitigate cancer care disparities between 1992 and 2002 appear to have been unsuccessful,” says Cary P. Gross, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine. “Future efforts to reduce cancer disparities should be incorporated into a larger framework that encompasses access to high-quality comprehensive care for all patients with cancer.”

The report, titled “Racial Disparities in Cancer Therapy: Did the Gap Narrow Between 1992 and 2002?", will appear in the February 15, 2008 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. Other authors of the study included Elizabeth Wolf and Martin Andersen at Yale and Benjamin D. Smith, M.D., of Wilford Hall Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

In total, they studied 7,775 colon, 1,745 rectal, 11,207 lung, 40,457 breast and 82,238 prostate cancer cases of individuals ages 66 to 85. The researchers found that there was no decrease in the size of the racial disparities during the 10-year period. There was little or no increase in the proportion of Black and White patients receiving therapy. Blacks were still significantly less likely than Whites to receive therapy for lung, breast, colon and prostate cancers.