Rural Patients With Melanoma Fare Worse Than Urban Dwellers
Source: Medscape, May 2024
Among people diagnosed with cutaneous melanoma in the United States, those who live in rural areas have significantly lower rates of survival than those who live in urban areas, results from an analysis of data from the National Cancer Institute showed.
“Melanoma is currently the fifth most common malignancy in the United States, with approximately 106,000 new cases and 7180 reported deaths occurring in 2021," the study’s first author, Mitchell Taylor, MD, a dermatology research fellow at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, Nebraska, and colleagues wrote in the abstract, which was presented during a poster session at the annual meeting of the Society for Investigative Dermatology. “Rural areas have been shown to bear a higher melanoma disease burden, yet there is a paucity of national-level studies examining these disparities."
To characterize the rural population diagnosed with cutaneous melanoma and assess associated disparities in the United States, the researchers queried the NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database to identify individuals diagnosed with cutaneous melanoma from 2000 to 2020 (International Classification of Diseases, 3rd Edition, 8720/3 – 8780/3; Primary Site codes C44.0-C44.9). They drew from US Office of Management and Budget terminology to define and categorize rural and urban communities.