Letter to the Editor
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2025. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Oncol. Jul 15, 2025; 17(7): 107460
Published online Jul 15, 2025. doi: 10.4251/wjgo.v17.i7.107460
Beyond numbers: Public health insurance and oesophageal cancer mortality risk
Divya K Huilgol, Brandon Lucke-Wold
Divya K Huilgol, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32601-7122, United States
Brandon Lucke-Wold, Department of Neurosurgery, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32608, United States
Co-first authors: Divya K Huilgol and Brandon Lucke-Wold.
Author contributions: Huilgol DK wrote the manuscript; Lucke-Wold B supported manuscript. Huilgol DK and Lucke-Wold B contributed equally to this article, they are the co-first authors of this manuscript; and all authors thoroughly reviewed and endorsed the final manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Open Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Brandon Lucke-Wold, MD, PhD, Department of Neurosurgery, University of Florida, 1505 SW Archer Road, Gainesville, FL 32608, United States. brandon.lucke-wold@neurosurgery.ufl.edu
Received: March 25, 2025
Revised: April 19, 2025
Accepted: May 22, 2025
Published online: July 15, 2025
Processing time: 112 Days and 14.3 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: Despite comprising a fifth of the global population, China carries approximately half of oesophageal cancer burden. With nearly the entire Chinese population covered by public health insurance plans, investigating the impact of insurance type, demographic features, and clinical aspects of treatment on patient mortality is critical to enacting measures to alleviate the economic burden and mortality rate of oesophageal cancer. Recent findings highlight the need for unifying and addressing inequities among these insurance plans while promoting oesophageal cancer prevention and detection. Future directions include analyzing the efficacy of insurance plans for rural Chinese communities which carry a disproportionate cancer burden.