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Review
. 2022 Apr;8(4):316-327.
doi: 10.1016/j.trecan.2021.11.010. Epub 2021 Dec 27.

Immune response and inflammation in cancer health disparities

Maeve Kiely  1 , Brittany Lord  1 , Stefan Ambs  2
Affiliations
Review

Immune response and inflammation in cancer health disparities

Maeve Kiely et al. Trends Cancer. 2022 Apr.

Abstract

Cancer death rates vary among population groups. Underserved populations continue to experience an excessive burden of lethal cancers that is largely explained by health-care disparities. However, the prominent role of advanced-stage disease as a driver of cancer survival disparities may indicate that some cancers are more aggressive in certain population groups than others. The tumor mutational burden can show large differences among patients with similar-stage disease but differences in race/ethnicity or residence. These dissimilarities may result from environmental or chronic inflammatory exposures, altering tumor biology and the immune response. We discuss the evidence that inflammation and immune response dissimilarities among population groups contribute to cancer disparities and how they can be targeted to reduce these disparities.

Keywords: African American; cancer disparity; immune response; inflammation.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interests No interests are declared.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Aspirin may have a more robust benefit as a cancer prevention tool for African Americans (AA) in certain cancer types. In breast cancer, AA women who are aspirin users show a decreased risk of ER- breast cancer [18]. For lung and prostate cancer, aspirin is associated with a reduced risk of mortality in AAs [64, 75]. These findings require validation but show promise for aspirin, and perhaps other drugs targeting inflammation, as a precision medicine prevention approach to reduce the existing survival disparities for certain cancer types.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Targeting enhanced interferon (IFN) signaling in tumors and systemic inflammation to improve survival among all cancer patients - but with a potential impact in reducing survival health disparities [26, 54, 67, 75].
Figure 3:
Figure 3:
Anti-IL-6 therapy as an example to potentially reduce cancer outcome disparities through an immune therapy approach [33, 45, 71, 85].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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Publication types