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The following is a summary of “Do Current Lung Cancer Clinical Trials Represent All Patient Populations Including Minorities?,” published in the November 2023 issue of Pulmonology by Nemala, et al.

Cancer clinical studies have long had a problem with not including enough people of color, gay people, and people of different genders. For a study, researchers sought to look at recent research to find out how many blacks in the US are involved in lung cancer clinical trials and what teaching methods have been looked into to get more patients to join these trials. Using PubMed and Google Scholar, a search was done for related papers released in 2015. Clinicaltrials.gov data on trials held in the United States were also gathered to determine how many minority patients were enrolled in lung cancer clinical studies. 

The literature search turned up six relevant articles about the presence of racial minorities in lung cancer clinical trials and one relevant article about the representation of LGBTQ+ minorities in cancer clinical trials. As a whole, the literature pointed out that racial minorities like Black, Hispanic, and American Indian people are underrepresented in clinical studies. Much research showed that registration differences were not as important for Asian lung cancer patients. Many stories, though, didn’t talk about minorities like those from the Middle East and North Africa or how South Asian and Pacific Asian minorities aren’t told apart. 

The results of the study of the literature supported the idea that minority groups in the United States are underrepresented in ongoing lung cancer clinical studies. Including people of different races, sexual orientations, and genders in the clinical study patient groups will help doctors figure out the best treatments and could lead to better results for people with lung cancer. To make lung cancer clinical trials more diverse in the future, educational tools should be used to get more minority patients to join, detailed demographic data should be included in analyses of cancer clinical trials, and providers and research staff from different minority groups should be hired to run cancer clinical trials.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S152573042300147X