Canadian Study Finds Higher Cancer Survival Rates Among the Rich

Having wealth can actually help your health. A recent Canadian study published in the American Cancer Society's journal, CANCER, demonstrated that those from rich communities had better cancer survival rates than those from poor communities.

Researchers from the Queen's University Cancer Research Institute in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, drew information from the Ontario Cancer Registry from 2003 to 2007 and the 2001 census, focusing on cancer survival among different socioeconomic groups. They found that people from low-income communities were more likely to die prematurely from cancer than those in high-income groups. Among breast cancer patients, the likelihood of being alive after five years was 77 percent among patients in the poorest communities but 84 percent among the wealthy. The findings for colorectal cancer patients followed the same trend; those among the poor had a 52 percent survival rate, which jumped to 60 percent among the rich.

The investigation analyzed the stage at which cancer was diagnosed among the different socioeconomic groups as a possible explanation. Past U.S. studies on the same subject found that those in lower economic communities were diagnosed at a later stage, but the Canadian findings disputed this. Dr. Christopher Booth, one of the Queen’s University researchers, said, “We observed only very small differences in the stage of disease at diagnosis across socioeconomic groups, and these differences did not account for the differences in survival." The Canadian study noted that Canadians of all socioeconomic groups had better access to health care than Americans, which could account for the difference in results.

Other factors that may affect survival levels among the poor and rich include unhealthy diets and smoking, which vary among socioeconomic levels. More research is needed to better understand why the survival disparity exists.