Finding Purpose Amid Health Challenges
- ‘Miss Virginia’ Marquita Taylor is living with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She uses her pageant platform to draw attention to cancer awareness and improve diversity in cancer research to include communities of color, especially Black women.
- Pancreatic cancer is a type of cancer that forms in the pancreas. It is more challenging to treat because symptoms usually don’t present themselves until the cancer has spread or metastasized. Symptoms may include weight gain, back pain, and jaundice.
- Black Americans tend to carry added distrust and apprehension towards the healthcare industry partly because of a long history of unethical medical practices towards Black people, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
- SurvivorNet experts recommend emphasizing earlier, more frequent screenings, increasing access to clinical trials, and providing more access to oncologists to help Close the care gap.
Marquita Taylor, PhD, known as Miss Virginia in the beauty pageant world, is vying for the national crown in 2025. Despite her many gifts and philanthropic efforts, she’s using her newfound platform to draw attention to an issue that is not getting enough attention—the lack of research into cancer disparities, particularly among Black women.
Dr. Taylor is a cancer patient herself, having been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer a decade ago when she was just 25 years old. The average age for a pancreatic cancer diagnosis is often in a person’s 70s.
YouTube/UVA School of Medicine
Taylor earned a master’s degree in public health and dedicated much of her time to researching the link between environmental effects and cancer incidence. Amid her research, she suspected her cancer diagnosis was likely linked to environmental factors she experienced growing up.
“That led me to determine that my cancer incident was environmental and related to food intake and lack of access to fresh produce,” Taylor said.
Taylor is now the associate director of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the University of Virginia’s Cancer Center. She’s using her position to help develop programs and make cancer treatment and research more inclusive so that communities of color and other marginalized communities are included in advancements in cancer treatment.
Progress Made to Close the Gap
SurvivorNet’s Close the Gap initiative is committed to raising awareness of these disparities and providing solutions to improve the survival rates of all cancer patients, regardless of their background. Our partners in this initiative include NYU Langone and The Perlmutter Cancer Center. We are committed to the fight for equality.
Solutions to Closing the Gap
SurvivorNet experts recommend emphasizing earlier, more frequent screenings. Other focus areas to improve access to care for racially diverse groups include:
- Reviewing a patient’s family medical history
- Address income inequality. Lack of access to healthcare due to no or limited health insurance is a barrier for some low-income patients.
- Increased access to clinical trials and oncologists
- Greater overall access to healthcare
- Improve the number of oncologists from diverse backgrounds
Addressing Disparities in Cancer Care
- ‘Significant Improvement’ Needed: Leading Cancer Groups Address the Extraordinary Racial Disparities in Outcomes for Cancer Patients
- Breast Cancer Thriver, Ananda Lewis, Addresses Racial Disparities In Cancer Care And The Importance Of Early Detection
- Cancer Trials Need More Black Participants; Here’s How We Can Close the Gap on Racial Disparities in Cancer Care
- Engage At The Grassroots And Invest In Education– How Merck’s Executive Director of Health Equity Is Addressing Racial Disparities In Cancer
- Community Engagement & Resources are Key to ‘Closing the Gap’ on Racial Disparities in Cancer Care
- How to Address Racial Disparities in Cancer Care
Coping With a Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis
Pancreatic cancer is a type of cancer that forms in the pancreas. It is more challenging to treat because symptoms usually don’t present themselves until the cancer has spread or metastasized. Symptoms may include weight gain, back pain, and jaundice.
Although pancreatic cancer often comes with a slim chance of survival due to difficulty detecting it when it is more treatable, Caprio remained positive going into his cancer journey.
Although pancreatic cancer survival rates have been improving, it’s still considered to be largely incurable. An exception to this is if the tumor is still small enough and localized enough to be operated on.
WATCH: Pancreatic cancer and early detection.
The National Cancer Institute identifies pancreatic cancer symptoms to include:
- Dark urine
- Pain in the abdomen
- Unexplained weight loss
- Light-colored stools
- Loss of appetite and fatigue
Treatment options for pancreatic cancer may include surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy.
Growing Hope for Pancreatic Cancer Treatment
Some progress has been made for patients in this situation, including one advancement that involved PARP inhibitors.
RELATED: How Do PARP Inhibitors Work for Pancreatic Cancer?
PARP inhibitors prevent cancer cells damaged often during chemotherapy from naturally healing themselves and have shown significant promise in treating ovarian and breast cancer. However, a study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting last year revealed that one of these PARP inhibitor drugs, olaparib (Lynparza), may also work for pancreatic cancer.
The drug extended the time that patients with advanced stages of pancreatic cancer who had BRCA gene mutations could live without the cancer worsening (a measurement doctors call “progression-free survival”). The drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Overcoming Cultural Barriers to Improve Healthcare for Black Women
Clinical trials and medical studies are crucial to understanding how medicine works. However, most people participating in these studies and clinical trials are white.
The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) says Black Americans are “under-represented in cancer clinical trials,” which can limit our understanding of therapeutic response to Black populations.
The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) said in a 2020 report that studied demographic data on clinical trials for drug participation 75% of participants were white, 8% were Black African Americans, 6% were Asian, and 11% were Hispanic.
WATCH: Black Americans and cancer screenings.
The federal agency noted that patient recruitment and retention were critical to understanding the effectiveness of clinical trial results.
“As it is, patient recruitment in oncology clinical trials is quite low. For Black patients, it is about 4%,” Dr. Joseph said, regarding the need for more diverse participation in this critical area of medicine.
Dr. Joseph highlighted some key areas the healthcare community must address to improve Black and other racial groups’ participation in medical studies and clinical trials.
“Trust has to be built not only between the doctor and the patient but also between the hospital and the community.”
“Moreover, there should be efforts to recruit minority patients by having diverse staff and ensuring that the language used in the recruitment literature is at the appropriate reading level and translated into the languages common in the community,” Dr. Joseph explained.
Building Trust
“It all comes down to trust and familiarity,” psychologist and founder of InnoPsych Dr. Charmain Jackman tells SurvivorNet.
“Our shared heritage engenders trust and serves as a first step to Black people trusting the medical field. However, there is still so much inherent bias in the way we are trained that if the Black professional is not doing the work of decolonizing (i.e., removing bias) their practice, my guess is that trust will be hard to keep, and the Black patient may not return for care,” Dr. Jackman adds.
Efforts to get more Black Americans to heed medical information, even from legitimate sources, become easier once past racism in medicine is fully atoned.
WATCH: Merck’s Josette Gbemudu explains how to improve outcomes for Black cancer patients.
Among the most notable instances of racism in medicine include the 1932 U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. It involved 600 Black men, 399 with syphilis and 201 without the disease.
The men involved were not offered penicillin to treat the disease. An advisory panel sanctioned by the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs found the Syphilis Study was “ethically unjustified.”
Other cases that left Black Americans harmed in medical advancements include Henrietta Lacks, who sought medical treatment for what turned out to be a malignant tumor on her cervix.
According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, Lacks’ cells obtained during a biopsy functioned differently than normal cells.
Her cells, also known as “HeLa cells, doubled every 20 to 24 hours,” while cells collected from others would die. Her cells have since been used to study the “effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses on the growth of cancer cells without experimenting on humans.” Problems arose once word spread.
Physicians kept Lacks’ family unaware her cells were being used without consent.
Medical experiments by the “Father of Gynecology,” James Marion Sims, the 19th-century physician who developed techniques still used today in women’s reproductive health, add to the distrust.
Despite Sims’ development of long-lasting techniques, he did so at the expense of enslaved Black women.
The prices Black Americans paid because of these historical incidents are wide-ranging and still felt today. The distrust discourages Black Americans from engaging in clinical trials and medical studies in more significant numbers.
Because these patients do not participate in clinical trials that test the effectiveness of new medical treatments, there is a lack of information on whether their outcomes will be the same.
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