October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

NEW YORK, Aug. 13 (UPI) -- African-American women have larger tumors and are more likely to have breast cancer spread to nearby lymph nodes, compared to whites, a U.S. study found.

Dr. Alfred Nougat of Columbia University Medical Center in New York City and Russell McBride of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health hypothesized that long-known racial differences in cancer survival between blacks and whites could be attributed to differences in tumor size and the number of lymph nodes with disease.

They analyzed clinical and demographic characteristics of 256,174 U.S. women with breast cancer -- 21,861 African American and 234,313 white -- diagnosed from 1988 to 2003 that showed that African-American women were more likely than white women to be diagnosed with tumors greater than 2.0 cm and to have at least one lymph node with disease, however, racial differences in lymph node involvement were apparent only in tumors smaller than 3.0 cm.

The study, published in the Sept. 15 issue of the journal Cancer and available online, found after adjusting for tumor size and lymph node status as well as demographic factors, African-American women were still more likely to die of breast cancer up to 56 percent higher than whites. (Source)

For decades, researchers have tried to understand why breast cancer in younger black women is such a significant public health problem.

Black women have fewer breast cancers than white women, but their mortality is worse. Black women under the age of 50 have a 77 percent higher mortality rate from breast cancer than white women of the same age.

Results of a study led by scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill schools of Public Health and Medicine and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer suggest one reason for these differences.

When younger, premenopausal, black women get breast cancer, they are more than twice as likely as older women, black or white, to get an aggressive breast cancer subtype, the study found. They are also much less likely to get the least aggressive type. A report of the research appears in the June 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"The present study adds an important piece to a large puzzle," said senior study author Dr. Robert Millikan. "Previous studies showed that many breast tumors in younger African American women are very fast-growing and hard to treat. (Continue Reading)

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