According to a new medical study, black women are significantly more likely to die within 3 years from breast cancer compared to white women after being diagnosed.
CBS NEWS reports:
The study, presented this week at an American Association for Cancer Research conference in Boston, involved 19,480 women who were treated for stage one to three breast cancer between January 2000 and December 2007. The researchers looked for breast cancer deaths among 634 Asian women, 1,291 Hispanic women, 1,500 non-Hispanic black women and 16,055 non-Hispanic white women.
After following-up with patients for an average of about seven years, the researchers determined non-Hispanic black women had almost a 50 percent higher risk for breast cancer death in the first three years following diagnosis compared with non-Hispanic white women. A black woman with estrogen-receptor-positive type breast cancer doubled her risk of dying within the first three years of diagnosis compared to a white woman. Death risk was also higher in black women with luminal A and luminal B breast cancer subtypes compared to their white counterparts.
“This finding is important because these are the types of tumors that we traditionally think of as more treatable,” Warner said.
After the three-year-period from first being diagnosed, the risk for dying of breast cancer in black women dropped to 34 percent.
There was no difference in death risk between black and white women for estrogen receptor-negative, basal or HER2-overexpressing tumor subtypes of breast cancer.
The study backs prior research that finds major racial disparities when it comes to breast cancer survival.
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