Abstract 4816: Racial disparities in adjunctive supportive care medication use in pancreatic cancer patients

Abstract Background: Beyond its well-known lethality, pancreatic cancer (PC) is associated with a wide variety of physical and psychological complications. These complications collectively lead to an increase in symptom burden experienced by patients with PC, as compared to other cancer types, leading to lower health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and worsened clinical outcomes. Reducing symptom burden is often achieved through the use of supportive care medications (SCM). Racial disparities have been described in the use of pain and psychiatric medications but limited research has explored potential disparities in access to and utilization of other SCM among diverse racial and ethnic groups. The goal of this study was to illustrate the presence of racial/ethnic disparities in the treatment patterns of supportive care medications in end-of-life care of PC patients Methods: We used data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) -Medicare-linked database from 2005 to 2017. Participants were identified using ICD9 and ICD10 diagnostic codes. Patients diagnosed with PC and have died in 2005-2007 with more than 1 year of Medicare enrollment before death were included. Logistic regression models to assess the association between use of supportive care medications and race, adjusting for covariates (sex, race, age, marital status, education, income, residence, CCI, year of diagnosis of PC, cancer stage). Results: After the application of the inclusion/exclusion criteria, 74, 309 patients were included in the final analysis (White: 72. 53%, Black 11. 01%, Hispanic 9. 60%, Asian/Pacific Islander 6. 58%) Racial and ethnic disparities in the use of multiple SCM drug classes were identified. The results are summarized in Table 1. Conclusion: Disparities in the use of SCM were found in patients with PC. Minorities had significantly less use of sleep aids and headache aids, and increased use of cognitive aids and appetite stimulants. AAs also had lower uses of anti-emetics. AA Hispanic Asian SCM Drug Class aOR 95% CI aOR 95% CI aOR 95% CI Anti-emetics 0. 77 (0. 73, 0. 81) 0. 98 (0. 93, 1. 03) 1. 01 (0. 95, 1. 08) Appetite stimulants 1. 06 (1. 01, 1. 11) 1. 01 (0. 96, 1. 06) 1. 28 (1. 20, 1. 36) Cognitive aids 1. 38 (1. 25, 1. 53) 1. 04 (0. 93, 1. 17) 1. 11 (0. 97, 1. 26) Headache aids 0. 68 (0. 63, 0. 74) 0. 81 (0. 74, 0. 87) 0. 85 (0. 77, 0. 93) Sleep aids 0. 71 (0. 67, 0. 75) 0. 87 (0. 82, 0. 92) 0. 87 (0. 81, 0. 93) Citation Format: Olga M. Trejos Kweyete, Yi Guo, Sherise C. Rogers, Lisa Scarton, David L. DeRemer, Chardae L. Whitner, Diana J. Wilkie, John M. Allen. Racial disparities in adjunctive supportive care medication use in pancreatic cancer patients abstract. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts) ; 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84 (6Suppl): Abstract nr 4816.