Researchers from the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine investigated the racial and ethnic survival differences in patients with follicular lymphoma (FL) and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). “Research suggests better survival among Hispanic [patients] with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) compared with non-Hispanic White (NHW) [patients],” the researchers remarked.
Their study was published in Cancer Causes & Control.
The researchers examined incidences of FL and CLL diagnoses at the Montefiore Medical Center from 2005 to 2016. Cox proportional hazards regression models were employed to separately assess the association between race and ethnicity and all-cause mortality among patients with FL and CLL.
The FL and CLL cohorts had a similar distribution: 39.3% were NHW, 19.4% were non-Hispanic Black, and 41.3% were Hispanic. After adjusting for factors such as age, sex, and use of chemotherapy, the researchers found that Hispanic patients with FL had lower all-cause mortality compared with NHW patients (hazard ratio, 0.22); however, all-cause mortality did not differ by any race or ethnicity in patients with CLL.
“In our diverse, urban population, we found that Hispanic [patients] diagnosed with FL had lower all-cause mortality compared with NHW [patients],” the researchers wrote. “We found no significant difference in all-cause mortality between Hispanic [patients] and NHW [patients] diagnosed with CLL.”
“Our study adds to the growing literature on racial and ethnic differences in survival among Hispanic [patients] with hematologic malignancies,” they concluded.
Source: Cancer Causes & Control
