Minority Women With Cancer Face Higher Pregnancy Risks: Duke Appiah, PhD, MPH

Duke Appiah, PhD, MPH, associate professor at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, discusses prior research done on adverse pregnancy outcomes among racial and ethnic minority women with cancer.

He then highlights key findings from his abstract, "Higher Risk of Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes Among Racial and Ethnic Minority Women With Cancer in the US," which he presented earlier this week at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2025 in Chicago.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Prior to your study, what was known about obstetric complications in women with cancer? Were there any gaps in the literature?

Prior to my work, there were some reports out there, which were talking about, for instance, preterm birth being more common among women with cancer, especially those who are adolescents and young adults. However, not much has been looked at in terms of the racial and ethnic differences.

Now, why would we just look at racial and ethnic differences? This is very important for decision-making. Again, prior studies have just looked at, let's say, a few of the adverse pregnancy outcomes, but we look at it more comprehensively and also to provide data that reflect every racial and ethnic group that we know currently in the United States, to help them in decision-making.

Having cancer, getting pregnant, and going to deliver a baby is a very complicated situation, which needs multifactorial factors to be included. Shared decisions have to be made between different specialties, so our work addressed the gap that there was not much comprehensive information on it and also reflected every race and ethnic group in the United States. We provide information to help in the decision-making, especially for the patients.

Can you summarize the main findings? Were there any that particularly stood out to you?

The main findings tended to reflect what we see in patients who do not have cancer. For instance, we looked at hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, gestational diabetes. We also looked at fetal growth restriction. We also looked at intrauterine fetal death. We also looked at preterm birth and maternal mortality.

For all these factors that I have mentioned, they tended to be higher in women who were of racial and ethnic minority groups. Then, if we look at it from the type of cancer, we didn't see much stronger association for those who had, let's say, melanoma, or those who had ovarian cancer. But when we came to breast cancer, as well as thyroid cancer, there was a 30% elevated risk in these groups.

Then, finally, we just wanted to compare whether, even within the same race, does having cancer makes an impact, or does it make a difference? We saw that, yes, it made a lot of difference in many of the adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Just to highlight, for instance, maternal mortality was high among patients with cancer for all racial and ethnic groups compared with the same racial and ethnic groups of women who did not have cancer. This highlighted the importance of adverse pregnancy outcomes, like maternal mortality, in this vulnerable population.