Quantifying geographical accessibility to cancer clinical trials in different income landscapes.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Clinical trials are increasingly perceived as a therapeutic opportunity for cancer patients. Favoring their concentration in few high-expertise academic centers maximizes quality of data collection but poses an issue of access equality. Analytical tools to quantify trial accessibility are needed to rationalize resources.

Materials and methods

We constructed a distance-based accessibility index (dAI) using publicly available data on demographics, cancer incidence and trials. Multiple strategies were applied to mitigate or quantify clear sources of bias: reporting biases by text mining multiple registries; reliability of simple geographical distance by comparison with high-quality travel cost data for Italy; index inflation due to highly heterogeneous cancer inciden

SUBMITTER: Tini G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9271515 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature