medwireNews: Black race is a significant predictor of nonadherence to scheduled screening mammography appointments, suggests research.
Among 5060 women with a mammography appointment at a US cancer center between January and March 2018, 6.2% did not attend nor did they reschedule within 6 months.
The proportion of Black women was significantly higher among the 316 no-shows than among an equal number of women randomly selected from the group that attended the appointment, at 61.4% versus 39.9%.
And multivariable analysis adjusting for confounders such as marital status and insurance type showed that Black women were a significant 57% more likely to miss their appointment than their non-Hispanic White counterparts.
“This suggests that race alone is an important contributor to nonattendance for screening mammograms, and targeted interventions to improve adherence in this population are critical,” write Foluso Ademuyiwa and co-authors, from the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, in Cancer.
They highlight interventions that have been shown to improve adherence, such as transportation programs and mobile mammography to overcome transportation barriers, telephone coaching to address psychosocial and logistic factors, and “[u]sing peer educators to deliver health messages and identify barriers to attendance.”
And the team concludes: “Ultimately, targeted population-specific strategies need to be developed to improve attendance and adherence to screening recommendations.”
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