Why are Black Women more likely to get Breast Cancer when they are young? And more likely to die from Breast Cancer?
1. It has been held amongst breast cancer researchers that the reason black women were more likely to die of breast cancer was the discrepancy in quallity of care. Black women get fewer mamograms, tend to have their breast cancers discovered when they have already spread, and they may receive less aggressive treatment.
2. Recent research has discovered that black women are still more likely to die of breast cancer, when all other factors are held constant.
THE WHY
A. Researchers using molecular tools have found that breast cancer comes in at least 5 variations.
B. One breast cancer variety, called 'triple-negative' because it lacks three key markers, grows quickly, recurs more often, and kills more frequently than other forms of breast cancer.
C. This cancer is much harder to treat because it does not respond to the most common and effective breast cancer therapies.
D. A detailed anaylysis of 496 breast tumors showed that a form of 'triple negative' cancer was startling more common in young black women, accounting for 39% of their cancers compared with 18% of white women's cancers.
E. Another California study, including 50,000 women, found 'triple negative' tumors to be twice as common in black women than in white women. The study found 'triple-negative' tumors to be more common in Hispanics, but not as common as in blacks.
F. When researchers studied African women, the 'triple-negative' gene including breast cancers accounted for 70% of the breast cancers of women in Nigeria and Senegal.
G. One study found that environment also contributed to the difference when they found that women who did not breast feed their babies were especially prone to 'triple-negative' cancers.