Ovarian, Breast Cancer Disparities Highlight Need for Better Screening: CK Wang, MD

A recent report from COTA, a real-world data company focused on cancer care, highlights that Black women are disproportionately diagnosed with advanced-stage ovarian and breast cancers compared with White women.

During an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care^®, CK Wang, MD, a hematologist-oncologist and chief medical officer at COTA, discusses these findings in the context of current screening guidelines for breast and ovarian cancers, emphasizing the importance of timely screenings to help close racial disparities in diagnosis and outcomes.

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

Transcript

Can you contextualize the importance of these data in relation to the recommended screening guidelines for breast and ovarian cancer?

For breast cancer, currently, as we all know, and this has been in place for many, many years, screening mammography has been in place. The guidelines will fluctuate depending on the age where one should start, and a lot of it depends on family and risk factors.

Now, for ovarian cancer, there is no good screening tool. Therefore, the screening guidelines are not really in place. Therefore, it depends on the patient coming in. What we see most often is a patient coming in complaining of vague abdominal symptoms, whether it's discomfort, bloating, or pain.

It is incumbent upon the clinician, whichever clinician that is that the patient is seeing, to hopefully do the right test and hopefully be able to pick up the disease much earlier on than it is typical. Most patients are diagnosed with relatively advanced disease just because of the lack of screening tools.

I think it's important to go back to the fact that ovarian cancer itself is a relatively underfunded cancer when it comes to research. Until recently, there have been very few therapeutic advances in this space. I am optimistic, especially over the last 2 years, there have been new drugs and new therapies coming to the market, and I hope that the trend will continue into the future.

I think that it is my hope that we will continue to focus on populations that are not well represented in our clinical trials to better understand how their care is being given in the real world and whether or not their care actually conforms to what we consider to be our standards. These are very important things because these patients are out there, and I suspect that they make up more of our population than we suspect.