Study Shows Socioeconomic Background of Cell Donors Affects Cancer Treatment Results
A research team led by the University of Minnesota Medical School demonstrated that the socioeconomic status of cell donors affects the health outcomes of blood cancer patients who underwent hematopoietic cell transplantation.
Hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) — also known as a bone marrow transplant or stem cell transplant — is a process that replaces a person’s abnormal blood cells with healthy ones from another person.
The study, published in PNAS, examined the health outcomes of 2,005 blood cancer patients treated with HCT across 125 hospitals in the U.S. The research found:
- Cancer patients who received cells from socioeconomically-disadvantaged donors experienced a 9.7% reduction in overall survival.
- There was a 6.6% increase in transplant-related mortality at three years compared to those transplanted from donors of high socioeconomic status — regardless of the cancer patient’s socioeconomic status.
“Social disadvantage penetrates so deeply that it is actually transplantable into a new host, and its effects persist over time,” said Lucie Turcotte, an associate professor in the U of M Medical School and pediatric hematologist and oncologist with M Health Fairview. Turcotte is also the director of the Masonic Cancer Center’s Cancer Survivorship Services and Translational Research program.
The research team plans to conduct further research to investigate the underlying biological and physiologic drivers of these findings in order to develop interventions to mitigate the adverse health outcomes introduced by socioeconomic disadvantage.
“The importance of these findings reach far beyond cancer and bone marrow transplant care — they demonstrate the profound health effects of social inequality and highlight the critical need for public health interventions,” said Turcotte.
Funding was provided by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.