Eliana Oduro

Today, TMZ is used across highly diverse clinical settings, yet little attention has been paid to whether its toxicity profile is equally burdensome for all patients. In a city as diverse as Los Angeles, patients of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds receive identical chemotherapy regimens despite the possibility that toxicity, treatment tolerance, and downstream treatment decisions may differ meaningfully across groups. Clinical observations suggest that some patients, particularly Black patients, experience more severe or disruptive adverse effects during TMZ treatment. These toxicities may not only worsen quality of life, but also lead to dose reductions, treatment delays, or early discontinuation of chemotherapy. When a standard treatment is systematically harder to tolerate for certain populations, it can limit access to the intended therapeutic benefit, even when the treatment itself is technically available. This raises an important and underexplored question in neuro-oncology: whether a uniform standard of care may unintentionally produce unequal outcomes because it was not designed or evaluated with diverse patient experiences in mind. 

The goal of this project is to examine whether TMZ functions as an equally tolerable treatment across patient populations and to understand how differences in toxicity contribute to adverse events and chemotherapy completion. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study will combine quantitative analysis of treatment-related adverse effects with qualitative interviews that explore how patients experience and interpret chemotherapy toxicity. Participants will be recruited from both a university-affiliated hospital and a community clinic to capture variation in clinical settings, access to resources, and socioeconomic context.