Cancer and college
Highly educated people dodge cancer better than high school dropouts
By Nathan Seppa
Thanks to better screening, prevention and treatment, death rates from cancer in the United States have declined steadily in recent decades. But a new study finds that while college graduates have benefited from this trend, people who didn’t finish high school have lagged behind and even missed out on some of these gains.
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Much of the discrepancy stems from differences between the groups in taking preventive measures such as quitting smoking or using cancer screening options, says study coauthor Ahmedin Jemal, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta.
But a lot can also be traced to the fact that 47 million people in the United States are uninsured, he says. Education levels closely track with socioeconomic levels, and that means access to good health care and insurance coverage to pay for it, he says.