Professor Guest-Edits Special Cancer Issue of LGBT Health.
Ulrike Boehmer, associate professor of community health sciences, is co-guest editor of a special cancer issue of LGBT Health.
Boehmer and her co-editor, Ronit Elk of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, had published a book on cancer and the LGBT community in 2015.
“Despite this topic’s timeliness,” Boehmer and Elk write in the LGBT Health special issue, “it is of note that, in contradistinction, none of the many oncology journals have devoted a special issue to LGBT populations.”
The special issue points to a growing body of research showing LGBT populations are at particular risk, from “lifestyle factors” like smoking to lower mammography screening adherence among bisexual women and transgender people.
Despite evidence of disparity, the editors explain, surveillance of cancer in LGBT populations remains mostly unaltered. Recent inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in some electronic health records will be helpful eventually, they write, but only after every hospital and doctor is filling in that information.
The editors add, “as long as LGBT populations remain uncounted, medically underserved, unrecognized as a designated minority population, and by some accounts excluded from clinical trials, the cancer burden of LGBT populations will persist largely unexamined.”
Boehmer says government funding fails the LGBT population when it comes to cancer. “I could pull up cancer data at any moment and point to disparities by race, by age, and we cannot do the same to find out about LGBT individuals,” she says.
“To date, we have very limited information about LGBT individuals’ well-being, their cancer survivorship.”
What are needed, she explains, are research dollars dedicated to understanding the cancer burden of LGBT population, and requirements for all researchers to collect sexual orientation and gender identity data in their studies, just as they are currently required to determine sex and race.
Calls for attention to the cancer burden on the LGBT population are not new: The editors note advocacy around breast cancer in the lesbian community in the 1990s.
However, Boehmer says she is excited about this special issue of LGBT Health. The issue includes perspectives from the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society, as well as a white paper of the 2014 National Summit on Cancer in the LGBT Communities.
The special issue also includes pieces on cancer in transgender individuals. “This is actually in my opinion an accomplishment,” Boehmer says, because information on cancer in transgender patients is especially limited. “We’re still talking about case reports,” she says, “because we never have been given the resources to put a sizable transgender sample together.”