Breast Cancer Disparities May Fuel Guideline-Concordant Care Improvements

Frustration can “be a wonderful fuel” for mitigating the racial disparities and gaps in guideline-concordant care (GCC) receipt for patients with inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), according to Oluwadamilola “Lola” Fayanju, MD, MA, MPHS, FACS.

Fayanju spoke with CancerNetwork^® about the key takeaways from her study illustrating how most patients with IBC do not appear to receive all available types of GCC they are eligible for, as well as modality-specific disparities for patients who are Asian, Black, Hispanic, or other racial minorities. She highlighted her hope that the findings would motivate other clinicians to consider how to administer GCC to more patients while developing therapeutic strategies that demonstrate efficacy across all populations.

Additionally, Fayanju described how multidisciplinary collaboration across medical oncologists, surgeons, radiation oncologists, and other team members has become increasingly important in treatment decision-making for patients with IBC.

Fayanju is the Helen O. Dickens Presidential Associate Professor, chief in the Division of Breast Surgery at Penn Medicine, surgical director of Rena Rowan Breast Center, director of Health Equity Innovation at Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation (PC3I), and senior fellow at Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI), Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Transcript:

I hope [the study] makes some people angry. I think that frustration can often be a wonderful fuel. [By] recognizing that there isn’t as much guideline-concordant care receipt, amongst all people, as there should be and the hope that’s provided when we achieve guideline-concordant care, we can mitigate and eliminate racial disparities. I hope [that] will motivate people to think about how we can get more [GCC] to more people and how we can incorporate diverse populations in the development of guidelines for concordant care at the beginning. Then, how can we also develop treatments that achieve efficacious results across diverse populations? I hope that what we found motivates people along all 3 of those dimensions.

There’s an increasing understanding of the importance of having multidisciplinary care involved from the beginning, with regard to [IBC]. That is surgeons, medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, and plastic surgeons working together in collaboration with the diagnostic professions of pathology and breast imaging to really have a plan of care for patients from the beginning such that everyone agrees on what the sequence of care is; no one’s diverging from that in a way that is not consistent with guidelines. [It would] help patients understand and focus on the importance of having a team upfront who can make sure they get from diagnosis to survivorship in the appropriate fashion.

Reference

Tadros A, Diskin B, Sevilimedu V, et al. Trends in guideline-concordant care for inflammatory breast cancer. JAMA Netw Open. 2025;8(2):e2454506. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.54506