Incidence of colon cancer among Medicaid beneficiaries with and without HIV under comparable colorectal cancer screening patterns

Abstract Background People with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV; PWH) in the United States have a lower incidence of colon cancer than the general population. The lower incidence may be explained by differences in receipt of screening. Thus, we sought to estimate colon cancer incidence under scenarios in which Medicaid beneficiaries, with or without HIV, followed the same screening protocols. Methods We used data from 1.5 million Medicaid beneficiaries who were enrolled in 14 US states in 2001–2015 and aged 50–64 years; 72 747 beneficiaries had HIV. We estimated risks of colon cancer and death by age, censoring beneficiaries when they deviated from 3 screening protocols, which were based on Medicaid's coverage policy for endoscopies during the time period, with endoscopy once every 2, 4, or 10 years. We used inverse probability weights to control for baseline and time-varying confounding and informative loss to follow-up. Analyses were performed overall, by sex, and by race/ethnicity. Results PWH had a lower incidence of colon cancer than beneficiaries without HIV. Compared with beneficiaries without HIV, the risk difference at age 65 years was −1.6% lower (95% confidence interval, −2.3% to −.7%) among PWH with the 2-year protocol and −0.8% lower (−1.3% to −.3%) with the 10-year protocol. Results were consistent across subgroup and sensitivity analyses. Conclusions Our findings suggest that the lower risk of colon cancer that has been observed among PWH aged 50–64 years compared with those without HIV is not due to differences in receipt of lower endoscopy. Keywords: colon cancer, colorectal cancer screening, endoscopy, Medicaid, human immunodeficiency virus