Disparities in Cancer Prevention and Epidemiology

Cancers result in premature deaths, lost productivity, and have an enormous impact on the communities of all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities. The distribution of this impact is not the same across these subgroups. For illustration, African American women experience higher death rates due to breast cancer in comparison with women of other racial and ethnic groups. The disparities are beyond the observable aspects of health, such as access to healthcare. As an example, patients from developing countries and those of low economic settings have little chance to participate in cancer trials. The existing disparities stem from the interplay of an individual’s biological, behavioral, socioeconomic, and environmental characteristics. There is much to be answered about the current inequalities. In particular, we barely have a clear picture of how they are shaped and impact people and how effectively we can remove them.

This Research Topic aims to provide an inclusive picture of the existing disparities in the prevention and epidemiology of cancers and their risk factors. It also seeks to serve as a starting point for further research and policymaking via covering all existing types of disparities and presenting the theoretical and practical interventions to tackle the disparities with a focus on patients.

Authors are welcomed to submit original and review articles that help depict the existing disparities in cancer health and risk factors, the determining factors, their impacts, and the strategies to address them, either at the individual or population level. The disparity types could be race or ethnicity, sex, sexual identity, age, disability, socioeconomic status, geographic location, or any new definition that the author pursues. And finally, we look to present articles for all measurement types related to cancer health including, but not limited to, incidence, prevalence, mortality, morbidity, survivorship, quality of life, access to care, quality of care, burden, screening rate, and stage at diagnosis.


Please note: manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by validation (independent cohort or biological validation in vitro or in vivo) are out of scope for this section and will not be accepted as part of this Research Topic.