Association Between Geographic Access and Receipt of Radiation Therapy

Trimodality therapy (chemoradiation and surgery) is standard of care for Stage II/III rectal cancer. Despite that nearly one third of patients do not receive radiation therapy. We examined the relationship between patient characteristics, density of radiation oncologist and travel distance to receipt of radiation. An observational, retrospective dataset from the National Cancer Data Base identified 26,845 between the ages of 18 -80 with Stage...