Insurance Status in Rectal Cancer is Associated With Age at Diagnosis and May be Associated With Overall Survival

There are approximately 44 180 new cases of rectal cancer diagnosed annually. While surgical resection remains the standard of care for definitive treatment, neoadjuvant chemoradiation therapy (NCRT) has significantly reduced recurrence rates postoperatively. NCRT is indicated for T3/T4 tumors, and relative indications include patients with T1/T2 lesions with clinically positive nodes. While this remains the standard of care, all patients may not receive equal treatment for their rectal cancer depending on various healthcare disparities. We aimed to discover how insurance status affected rectal cancer patients' time of diagnosis to treatment, age of diagnosis, and overall vitality.

A single-center retrospective chart and cancer registry review was performed for all patients diagnosed with rectal cancer of any stage between 2011 and 2018. A total of 94 rectal cancer patients were included in the analysis. Age, race, sex, insurance status, vitality, and grade were assessed. Time in days of diagnosis to the time of first treatment (neoadjuvant chemotherapy or radiation) was measured. Continuous variables were reported as means and SDs or medians and interquartile ranges and were analyzed with the unpaired t-test or Mann-Whitney U-test. Categorical variables were reported as frequencies and percentages and were analyzed with Fisher's exact test. Statistical significance was determined with a P < .05. All analyses were conducted using SAS version 9.4 (SAS Institute, Cary, NC, USA).

Total race breakdown was as follows: white (61%), African-American (30%), and other (3%). There was no statistically significant difference in diagnosis time to first treatment in the uninsured versus insured groups (P = .9). There was a statistically significant difference in the age of diagnosis with insured mean age of 60.9 years and uninsured mean age of 52.4 years (P = .0080). There was no statistically significant difference in survival between the 2 groups (P = .54). For those who went onto have surgery, there was no difference in the median number of lymph nodes harvested between the 2 groups (P = .73).

Insurance status did not affect timing to treatment or survival. Uninsured patients had a younger age of diagnosis by approximately 8 years on average. Uninsured patients received the same quality surgeries as uninsured patients in regard to lymph node harvests.