Credit: Rhoda Baer
A review of clinical trial data from 2012 suggests Hispanic patients are underrepresented in US cancer studies, and many trial publications fail to provide information on patients’ racial/ethnic backgrounds.
Researchers analyzed 159 reports of phase 2 and 3 trials and found that roughly 21% included information on the number of minority patients enrolled.
About 8% of the publications included data on the number of Hispanic patients enrolled.
And from this data, the investigators found the accrual rate for Hispanic patients was about 4%.
According to the researchers, this lack of information and low representation inhibits physicians’ ability to provide optimal treatment to Hispanic cancer patients and patients belonging to other minority groups.
“We have a major responsibility to ensure adequate representation,” said study author Ian M. Thompson Jr, MD, of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
“How else will we know how best to treat our patients, and how else are we going to reduce the health disparities in [the Hispanic] population?”
Dr Thompson and his colleagues have a particular interest in the Hispanic population because 58% of San Antonio residents are Hispanic, as are 68% of residents in South Texas as a whole.
So the investigators wanted to determine Hispanic accrual rates in randomized trials of cancer patients. The team evaluated data from phase 2 and 3 cancer trials published in 2012. They focused on studies that were considered likely to change the standard of care and were published in “high-impact” journals.
The researchers identified 159 trials—68 phase 2 studies and 91 phase 3 studies. They discovered that 33 of the trial publications—about 21%—disclosed data on minority accrual. And 13 publications—about 8%—included data on the accrual of Hispanic cancer patients.
Of the 4154 patients enrolled on those 13 trials, 162 were Hispanic, which translates to an overall accrual rate of 3.9%. The enrollment of Hispanic patients ranged from 1 patient (0.5%) in a phase 2 trial of lung cancer to 17 patients (26%) in a phase 2 study of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“Fundamentally, in the most recent published cancer clinical trials, either the number and proportion of Hispanics are not reported or are far below their actual representation in the national population,” Dr Thompson summarized.
“For institutions like ours that serve a ‘minority-majority’ population, it’s a major responsibility for us to ensure adequate representation so that we can tell our patients how they can best be treated and how we can reduce the disparities of this rapidly growing population.”
Dr Thompson and his colleagues described this research in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
