Patients diagnosed with autism are 35.6% less likely to receive cancer screening within one year of reaching screening eligibility despite being diagnosed at roughly the same rate as the general population. As a result, patients with autism are more likely to die from cancer than those without autism, according to a study published July 28 by Epic Research.
Epic Research used Cosmos data from 6 million U.S. adults who newly became eligible for breast, cervical, colorectal or prostate cancer screening between 2022 and 2024 for the study. Cosmos is a dataset representing more than 310 million patient records from a community of Epic health systems across the U.S., Canada, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.
Here are three notes on the study:
- While on-time cancer screening was 35.6% less likely overall for patients with autism, rates varied by cancer type.
- Across cancer types, on-time cancer screening for patients with autism was:
- 50.7% less likely for cervical cancer
- 28.7% less likely for breast cancer
- 14.9% less likely for prostate cancer
- 12.1% more likely for colorectal cancer
- Researchers attributed the higher likelihood of on-time colorectal cancer screening among patients with autism to screening modalities, with at-home, stool-based tests accounting for 46.2% of colorectal cancer screenings among patients with autism compared with 37.6% among patients without autism.
Read the full study here.
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