Alarming report: Poor people aren’t taking part in cancer trials

Poor cancer patients are far less likely to be in a clinical trial, a new study has found.

A new report has found that poor people who have cancer aren’t taking part in clinical trials nearly as much as others.

A study of 1,200 adult patients over six months who had been diagnosed with either breast, lung, or colorectal cancer and were mostly younger, white women found that those with below average wages were less likely to participate in a clinical trial, according to a US News report.

Specifically, they found that those who made less than $50,000 were 32 percent less likely to participate than those who had higher incomes, and as incomes went down, the participation rates did as well. In fact, just 11 percent of people who have household incomes of less than $20,000 opted to participate in a clinical trial.

This is a concerning finding for medical experts, who say that clinical trial treatments are typically the newest available treatments that should be available to those of all income levels.

Why is this such a problem? There are a few reasons. For one thing, low incomes are often linked to health status, and if less lower income people participate in a study, it could skew the results.

Also, more lower income patients participating in a trial could help them get conducted more quickly, and thus allow a new treatment to more quickly get approved.

The findings were published in the journal JAMA Oncology.

Clinical trials are basically experiments done for the purpose to clinical research, and often involve testing new treatments on patients who opt in and often have an advanced stage of a disease where it wouldn’t hurt to try some new type of promising treatment. These research studies are usually designed to answer questions regarding biomedical or behavioral interventions. They allow the collection of data on the safety and efficacy of the drug.

Officials will typically enroll patients into smaller initial studies, and then gradually include larger groups for more comprehensive studies. Therefore, clinical trials very greatly on size and cost, based on the current phase of the treatment’s development.