A Systematic Review of Head and Neck Cancer Health Disparities: A Call for Innovative Research.

There has been extensive study of health disparities for head and neck cancer, largely focusing on individual patient factors or health care access and quality. This review identifies gaps in this research, with large numbers of retrospective database studies and little discussion of potential contributors and explanations for these disparities. We recommend shifting research on disparities upstream toward a focus on community and societal factors, rather than individual, and an evaluation of interventions to promote health equity.