Patients with an immigrant background may face barriers to accessing healthcare that could influence cancer management and outcomes. The study summarized here used Danish national clinical registries to examine whether initiation of standard first-line treatment and short- and longer-term survival differ between patients with an immigrant background and patients of Danish origin.
The analysis included patients aged 50 years or older diagnosed with a first primary diagnosis of colon, lung, prostate, or kidney cancer between 2011 and 2022. Cases were ascertained from national clinical cancer databases. The cohort was designed to capture real-world patterns of treatment initiation and survival in these four common solid tumors among older adults in Denmark.
Two categories of outcomes were evaluated:
Group comparisons were reported as risk ratios (RRs) comparing patients with an immigrant background to patients of Danish origin. The abstract does not specify other analytic details such as covariates used for adjustment, statistical modelling approaches, or absolute event rates; those details were not reported in the abstract.
The study categorized immigrant background by region of origin into three groups:
Comparisons were made between each of these groups and the reference group of patients of Danish origin.
Across the four cancer types included (colon, lung, prostate, kidney), the study found no systematic or consistent differences in initiation of first-line treatment or in survival when comparing patients with an immigrant background to patients of Danish origin. In other words, the aggregate findings indicated broadly similar patterns of treatment initiation within 30 and 90 days and of 1- and 5-year survival across the immigrant groups versus Danish-origin patients.
Although the overall pattern showed similarity, several subgroup findings reached statistical significance:
Lung cancer patients from Central and Eastern Europe had a lower probability of initiating treatment within 30 days (30-day RR 0.76, 95% CI 0.62–0.93) and within 90 days (90-day RR 0.92, 95% CI 0.87–0.98) compared with Danish-origin lung cancer patients. This same group also had a lower 1-year risk of death (1-year RR 0.85, 95% CI 0.77–0.93).
Patients from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia showed a lower 30-day treatment initiation (30-day RR 0.80, 95% CI 0.64–1.00) compared with patients of Danish origin. The abstract does not state which cancer site(s) this estimate pertains to beyond inclusion in the overall analysis.
Among prostate cancer patients, those from other Western countries had a higher 5-year risk of death (5-year RR 1.16, 95% CI 1.01–1.34) compared with prostate cancer patients of Danish origin.
These subgroup findings indicate that some statistically significant differences exist, but they do not form a consistent pattern across cancer types or origin regions.
The authors conclude that, overall, patients with an immigrant background had similar initiation of standard first-line cancer treatment and similar survival outcomes to patients of Danish origin. Where differences were observed, they were limited to specific cancer types and specific origin groups rather than representing a uniform disparity affecting all immigrant-background patients.
The study highlights that while population-level equity in these measures appears largely preserved in Denmark for the selected cancers and age group, certain subgroups showed deviations that warrant further investigation.
The abstract provides key comparisons and several RRs with 95% confidence intervals for specific subgroup findings, but it does not report several methodological or contextual details in the abstract itself. Specifically, the abstract does not report:
These unreported items were not available in the abstract and would need to be consulted in the full article for detailed evaluation of study methods and robustness of findings.
Based on the abstract, the principal implication is that Denmark’s registry-based evaluation identified no broad, systematic disparities in initiation of first-line cancer treatment or in survival between older patients with an immigrant background and those of Danish origin for colon, lung, prostate, and kidney cancer during 2011–2022. Nevertheless, the statistically significant subgroup differences by cancer type and region of origin indicate areas for targeted follow-up research to understand underlying causes and to ensure equity across all patient groups.