http://goo.gl/Oa3aKn
AML will affect approximately 20,830 and kill 10,460 Americans in 2015. Tremendous progress has been made in identifying disease characteristics that cause a patient to have a higher or lower chance of cure following intense treatment, which often involves bone marrow transplantation. Now investigators at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have analyzed a database with 5,541 patients younger than 65 years of age to demonstrate that, in addition to age and disease characteristics, other "non-biological" patient characteristics also matter. The study is the largest to date to look at socioeconomic factors in outcomes of younger patients with AML.
Patients who were single or divorced, patients who were uninsured or were Medicaid beneficiaries, and patients who lived in areas with lower income had substantially elevated risks of dying prematurely. "We believe these three factors indicate lack of material and social support preventing young patients from successfully walking the long and difficult road towards a cure," said Uma Borate, MD, lead author of the study, and assistant professor in the UAB Division of Hematology and Oncology.