In The New York Times, Roni Caryn Rabin took a look at the National Cancer Institute’s new online colorectal cancer risk assessment tool and found that users who, in response to the first two questions, tell the system they’re black or Hispanic are confronted with a red warning box: “At this time the risk calculations and results provided by this tool are only accurate for non-Hispanic white men and women ages 50 to 85.”
Rabin said the omission was particularly problematic “since blacks are at higher risk than whites for colorectal cancer, developing it and dying of it at higher rates, and recent reports suggest the racial gap is widening.”
“I’m frankly a bit taken aback,” said Gail Christopher, vice president for programs at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, after being referred to the site by a reporter. “This is not acceptable. N.C.I. can do better.”
N.C.I. officials said they are modifying the risk assessment tool so it will be applicable to blacks, Hispanics and Asians, but said the data they used to test the model’s precision were drawn from studies with mostly older white participants. As a result, they weren’t able to estimate relative risks for people from other racial and ethnic groups, or for those younger than 50.
“It will be more difficult to validate this model in other ethnicities, because data is more difficult to come by,” said Dr. Andrew Freedman, the N.C.I. epidemiologist who authored the risk assessment tool.
