Three months ago, Beulah Brent helped a woman diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer navigate the health care system. On Feb. 9, that woman, a single mother of seven, passed away.
Brent, CEO of Sisters Working It Out, a nonprofit supporting and advocating for patients, said the woman’s death could have been preventable.
“All of this could have been avoided if she only understood what breast cancer was from the beginning,” Brent said. “There’s no guarantee, but there could have been a possibility that her life could have been saved.”
Brent is the co-chair of the community advisory board for the Center to Eliminate Cancer Inequity, a new program launched Friday at the University of Chicago’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The center, CinEquity, will focus on community-engaged research to identify and develop possible solutions to the health disparities in cancer care and prevention.
Dr. Jasmin Tiro, director of the center, cited factors like poverty, residential segregation, food access and limited access to medical care as contributors to higher cancer mortality rates among specific populations such as communities of color and low-income residents.
“We have some major research needs to understand how to better address and design interventions and solutions,” Tiro said. “That’s where the idea of the center would be to really help support community-academic partnerships.”
Tiro said the goal of the center is to provide infrastructure to sustain community-focused research.
Cancer rates are expected to increase by 49% from 2015 to 2050, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted in a 2021 report. On Chicago’s South Side, residents are twice as likely to die from cancer as those who live elsewhere, according to a 2022 University of Chicago report.
Tiro noted these disparities have been documented for more than 20 years with little improvement and merely identifying vulnerable populations has not resolved the issues. CinEquity — pronounced “see inequity” — aims to work directly with the community to find solutions or policy changes that bring about needed changes.
“The center will work with the community to hold our feet to the fire and evaluate our progress moving the cancer inequity needle in the right direction,” said Mark Anderson, executive vice president for medical affairs at UChicago.
Dr. Otis Brawley, a member of the center’s external advisory board and a professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University, cited a study he conducted in 2018 that found that 132,000 of the average 600,000 annual cancer deaths would not occur if all Americans had the same cancer outcomes as college-educated Americans.
He urged attendees of the center’s launch to focus more on prevention, which comes from eliminating social factors of inequity, than on over-screening and treatment.
“For the most part, the drugs work, but socially, Blacks don’t get the drugs. That’s the bigger issue, and we’ve got to deal with that issue if we’re going to start overcoming some of these problems,” Brawley said.
Brent, who has been supporting cancer patients for more than 20 years, said she hopes CinEquity will make change possible.
“I’m really believing that we’re going to actually be able to do this now,” Brent said. “We can continue to fight to make sure all of our patients are treated equally.”
