41819 Self Skin Exams and Full Body Skin Exams In Patients with Disabilities

Background: Full body skin exams (FBSE) and self-skin exams (SSE) are screening methods associated with reduced skin cancer incidence due to earlier detection and treatment of lesions.(1, 2) We investigated the frequency of FBSE and SSE in persons with disabilities. We performed a retrospective analysis on skin cancer screening from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2013 and 2017. Multivariate odds ratios, adjusted for demographic and socioeconomic factors, were calculated using IBM-SPSS. The study cohort comprised a weighted population of 478,008,736 respondents of which 26,727,370 were patients with disabilities. Respondents with disabilities reported a lower frequency of FBSE (OR .74; CI 95% .69-.79; p<0.001) and SSE (OR .85; CI 95% .78-.91; p< 0.001), compared to respondents without disabilities. The nature of patients’ disabilities may affect their ability to maneuver one’s body for inspection or visual examination with a mirror.(3) Thus, patients with disabilities who experience difficulty conducting SSE should have FBSE in order to routinely assess lesional changes, but similar to a prior study, we found that patients with disabilities are also less likely to receive FBSE.(4) Lowered self and clinician-guided screening can increase skin-cancer related morbidity and mortality in persons with disabilities. Future studies are needed to identify barriers to skin cancer screening in diverse populations of individuals with disabilities.