Cancer care in Latin America

Pharmaceutical trials for expensive new anticancer therapies are largely unhelpful to most patients in Latin America. Patients participating in trials of expensive new anticancer therapies sometimes cannot complete treatment once their trial ends, and the trials often do not lead to approval in these regions.

There are often geographical disparities where most cancer specialists are located in major hospitals in big cities, requiring patients from rural and remote areas to travel far distances to these hospitals for cancer care.

In addition, waiting times in these centers can be unacceptably long, with reports from Mexico and Brazil describing median waiting times of 7 months or more for patients with breast cancer from symptomatic presentation to initial treatment.

Better cancer registries are desperately needed in all Latin American countries to more accurately quantify the cancer burden in the region and the resources required to combat it, according to the report.