Despite considerable advances in the field of treatment and diagnosis, “the current state of diagnostic and therapeutic care does not seem homogeneous across the territory, as does access to innovative practices”underlines the Academy of Medicine, in a report made public this Monday. “These inequalities in access have perhaps increased in recent years (post-Covid), due to the economic and human resources difficulties encountered in community medicine and hospitals”add the authors of the report.
To try to remedy this, the Academy of Medicine recommends several measuresas “precise targeting and evaluation of prevention policies” of cancer and an incentive policy for careers in oncology.
Cancers remain the leading cause of premature mortality in France among men, the second among womenand their frequency has doubled in around thirty years, with more than 433,000 new cases in mainland France in 2023.
The shortcomings of “Pink October”
Despite a very structured organization of oncology, it remains difficulties and territorial inequalities “throughout the care pathway“, warns the Academy of Medicine. Prevention policies are thus judged “too general, insufficiently funded, poorly evaluated and of little concern to populations at risk for economic or socio-cultural reasons”. The famous “Pink October”, for breast cancer screening, is singled out for not having led to “no increase in the number of screening mammograms“. “No doubt it would have been preferable to carry out a precise assessment of this mobilization and to better identify unscreened women to raise their awareness”according to the report.
Favor “precise targeting”
The Academy of Medicine therefore recommends “precise targeting and evaluation of prevention policies” you cancerbut also “an active prevention policy” for patients who are cured but at high risk of complications and early death thereafter.
While the genomic characteristic of tumors is “indispensable“, the report also pleads for a “interaction maximale” between two categories of analysts, anatomopathologists and molecular biologists, and the replacement of molecular tests on a single gene by tests on groups of genes, to avoid a “loss of luck” for patients.
The Academy also defends “price homogenization between public and private actors, and not weakening locoregional cancer treatments“which act directly on the tumor or on the region of the tumor. It also urges, among other things, to an incentive policy for oncology careers because, otherwise, the shortage of caregivers could increase inequities of access, or even mortality.
