A first of its kind report from the American Cancer Society is shedding new light on cancer risks for LGBTQ people.

It finds that some LGBTQ populations are more likely to have cancer risk factors like smoking, heavy alcohol use or

excess body weight. Transgender people are less likely to be screened for cervical, colorectal, and prostate cancer.

And LGBTQ people continue to face barriers to high quality health care, including discrimination.

Dr. William Dayhut is the American Cancer Society's Chief Scientific Officer.

Dr. Dayhut, this is the first time this is being done, this is being looked into.

Why now, why did you decide to do this now? Well, thanks very much

for having me on today. It's really a great question. You know, it's really important to

know that this was really a way for us to get a clue to the cancer risk to this population.

Cancer communities, cancer registries do not collect data for cancer deaths, cancer incidents based on sexual orientation or gender.

So I think this is really important to begin to understand is the risk different so we begin to capture that

information in a much more critical way. Were there things on your findings that

surprised you and what do you think are the key takeaways from this report?

Yeah a couple of things are really important.

I think first of all, you really need to disaggregate the data by the population.

This isn't really one homogeneous group.

So certain groups, I think as you commented on early on

looking at bisexual women in their 40s and 50s, you know, much higher alcohol use,

obesity use, tobacco use, these are real risk factors for cancers.

Other things were also interesting.

You know, overall, the vaccination rates

were actually fairly similar to other populations,

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