Onsite availability similar across racial and ethnic groups, but minority patients less likely to receive diagnostic imaging after abnormal screening
By Elana Gotkine HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, Feb. 19, 2025 (HealthDay News) — For patients after screening mammography, onsite availability of most diagnostic services is similar across race and ethnicity groups, but minority groups are less likely to receive standard-of-care diagnostic imaging after abnormal screening, according to a study published online Feb. 18 in Radiology.
Marissa Lawson, M.D., from the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, and colleagues conducted a retrospective study involving women aged 40 to 89 years who underwent screening mammography at 136 facilities across six states from January 2010 to December 2020 to identify multilevel factors associated with onsite availability and receipt of diagnostic imaging and biopsy after screening mammography.
Overall, 1,123,177 female patients underwent 3,519,502 screening mammograms. The researchers found that race or ethnicity and neighborhood-level socioeconomic status were not associated with onsite diagnostic service availability in most fully adjusted models. However, racial and ethnic minorities were less likely to receive same-day diagnostic services after abnormal screening mammography compared with White patients (relative risks, 0.74, 0.56, and 0.61 for Asian, Black, and Hispanic patients, respectively). After an abnormal diagnostic work-up, Black patients were less likely to receive same-day biopsies (relative risk, 0.46).
“We did not detect major differences in the onsite availability of most diagnostic services across different groups of individuals on the basis of race and ethnicity or neighborhood-level socioeconomic factors but observed differences in the receipt of standard-of-care diagnostic services, advanced technologies, same-day diagnostic services, and same-day biopsies across different groups,” the authors write.
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