Rural Cancer Patients Diagnosed Earlier Than Urban Resident

Dartmouth College researchers have discovered that, contrary to popular belief, it is rural patients--not urbanites--who receive the earlier cancer diagnosis. These findings, according to a press release from Dartmouth, is applicable at least for those who wound up receiving diagnoses of colorectal cancer and lung cancer--two diseases most treatable when caught early.

This information can also be found in an article, "Rural Versus Urban Colorectal and Lung Cancer Patients: Differences in Stage at Presentation," which has been published in the November 2007 issue of Journal of the American College of Surgeons. Ian Paquette (a general surgery resident), and Sam Finlayson (surgeon and vice chair for academic affairs for the Department of Surgery) are both of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) and wrote the article.

The researchers pored over data concerning national figures on lung and colorectal cancers and discovered that rural patients were trending toward getting diagnosed earlier than urban dwellers even when such factors as race, gender, marital status, and income and education levels were controlled; such demographic information is usually significant when determining which patients are diagnosed with late-stage cancers.

These findings are highly important in determining where to focus screening efforts, which can help reduce the number of people who are first diagnosed with their cancers in later stages. Generally speaking, the earlier a cancer is caught, the better the prognosis will be for the patient. The press release states that the reasons colorectal and lung cancer received the focus of this study is because these are two types of cancer surgeons usually see among their everyday patients.

This study considered the data of more than 285,000 patients from a 2000-2003 information provided by the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database covering 18 states. Over 160,000 of the cases evaluated were for those who presented lung cancer; more than 125,000 patients had colon cancer. The study utilized rural-urban continuum codes supplied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine which patients hail from urban areas versus those residing in rural locales.

"Where we practice [DHMC attends to rural areas in New Hampshire and Vermont], most doctors can tell stories about patients who have presented at a very late stage of a disease, and we find it hard to imagine that they could have ignored their symptoms for so long," remarks Paquette.

Resource:

Dartmouth College. "Rural Patients' Cancers Diagnosed Earlier, Say Medical School Researchers." 20 November 2007. 22 November 2007. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2007/11/20a.html