• Posted March 6, 2026

Racial Disparities Persist In Lung Cancer Treatment, Study Finds

Black lung cancer patients are less likely to receive surgery or radiation therapy aimed at curing their cancer compared to white patients, a new study says.

This gap has persisted with minimal improvement since the early 1990s, researchers reported March 2 in JAMA Network Open.

“The past 30 years have seen tremendous progress in our fundamental understanding of lung cancer and the development of new treatment strategies,” senior researcher Dr. Cary Gross, a professor at Yale School of Medicine, said in a news release.

However, those advances haven’t equally benefitted Black patients, researchers said.

“If you’re developing cures for cancer, but it’s not getting into the hands of everybody who needs it, then you haven’t succeeded,” Dr. Olivia Lynch, a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale School of Medicine, said in a news release.

For the study, researchers examined treatment patterns for more than 28,000 Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer between 2005 and 2019.

Results showed that overall use of surgery and radiation increased over time, but Black patients remained significantly less likely to receive them.

For example, about 53% of Black patients versus 66% of white patients received surgery for lung cancer between 2005 and 2007, researchers found.

By 2015 to 2017, that gap remained, even though fewer patients and doctors were opting for surgery as other, less invasive treatments became more popular. During that period, 44% of Black patients received surgery versus 53% of white patients.

This gap occurred even though the study focused only on people who had Medicare, which rules out lack of insurance as an explanation.

“The findings point to deeper access issues, especially access to surgeons and surgical services,” Lynch said.

Researchers also found that when Black patients did get surgery, there were equally likely to receive the operation recommended by cancer treatment guidelines.

That suggests that the gap in access to treatment occurs early in the process, before patients ever reach an operating room, researchers said.

The study’s results also shed light on how new medical advances can unintentionally widen inequities.

For example, a highly targeted radiation treatment called stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) became widely available in the early 2010s.

However, Black patients were significantly less likely to receive SBRT during its initial rollout. It took some years for the radiation treatment to become more widely available to Black patients, results showed.

Now that these discrepancies have been documented, Lynch wants the focus to shift toward fixing them.

“Despite all the effort and attention, we haven’t improved as much as we should have,” Lynch said. "The next step has to ask why — and what we’re going to do differently.”

More information

The National Cancer Institute has more on cancer disparities.

SOURCES: Yale Medicine, news release, March 2, 2026; JAMA Network Open, March 2, 2026