Dartmouth researchers have found that African American women are 55 percent less likely to receive breast reconstruction after mastectomy regardless of where they received their care. They report on their findings in \u201cThe influence of race\/ethnicity and place of service on breast reconstruction for Medicare beneficiaries with mastectomy,\u201d recently published in\u00a0SpringerPlus<\/a>.<\/p>\n \"We wanted to understand whether the racial disparity observed in breast reconstruction among women with\u00a0breast cancer<\/a>\u00a0was related to\u00a0where\u00a0women received care, independent of race,\" said\u00a0Tracy Onega, PhD<\/a>, Associate Professor of\u00a0Community & Family Medicine<\/a>,\u00a0Norris Cotton Cancer Center<\/a>, andThe Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice<\/a>,\u00a0The Geisel School of Medicine<\/a>\u00a0atDartmouth<\/a>. \"This study fills an important gap in addressing whether racial disparities in breast reconstruction are due \u2013 at least in part - to disproportionate use of hospitals with services available.\"<\/p>\n Breast reconstruction after mastectomy is associated with better quality of life and other benefits\u2014in fact insurance coverage for reconstruction is legislatively mandated. The study found that African American women were 55 percent less likely to receive breast reconstruction after mastectomy. Lower likelihoods of breast reconstruction for women of all races were observed for those attending hospitals that were: rural (67 percent less likely than urban), non-teaching (25 percent less likely than teaching), not part of cooperative oncology groups (32 percent less likely than coops), and performed fewer breast cancer surgeries (between 24-31 percent less likely than the highest quartile of volume). Although the effect of hospital type on breast reconstruction is significant, African American and Caucasian women did not differ significantly in their use of hospitals with these characteristics.<\/p>\n \u201cThe next step is to understand which factors contribute to the disparity,\u201d said Onega. \u201cWe want to understand whether these factors are economic (although all women studied were insured by Medicare), cultural, behavioral, etc. so that we can begin to develop targeted interventions for all women who would prefer to have reconstruction after mastectomy, to increase their quality of life and well-being.\u201d<\/p>\n This work was supported by funding from the National Institute of Health, National Cancer Institute under grant R01 CA149365-01, and American Cancer Society institutional grant ACS IRG-82-003-24. This study used the linked SEER-Medicare database. The authors acknowledge the efforts of the Applied Research Program, NCI; the Office of Research, Development and Information, CMS; Information Management Services (IMS), Inc.; and the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program tumor registries in the creation of the SEER-Medicare database<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dartmouth researchers have found that African American women are 55 percent less likely to receive breast reconstruction after mastectomy regardless of where they received their care. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":480,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-research","post_format-post-format-aside","author-15"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2014\/03\/logo-460.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-102","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3847,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3846\/revisions\/3847"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}