A new study has found that there is a racial disparity when it comes to breast cancer care in women. Researchers reported on Tuesday - in what is the largest disparity study on breast cancer treatment in the United States - that black women are more likely to get diagnosed later and receive the wrong treatment for breast cancer, as opposed to white women.
According to Time, a new study has been published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention that illustrated the importance of not only biology and genetics but racial and ethnic backgrounds.
A team of researchers led by Lu Chen from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's public health sciences division found that minority women, especially African-American women, are at a disadvantage when it comes to breast cancer treatment. Black women are more likely to be diagnosed at later stages when there are fewer, if any, options left to take.
The study had a population of over100,000 women across a broad range of social, economic and cultural strata who hailed from 18 different cancer centers. The data showed African-American, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian women had a 20% to 60% higher rates of diagnosis with stage 2 to stage 4 breast cancers of any type compared to Caucasian women. Further, the highest risk is among African-American women, who had a 40% to 70% greater risk of being diagnosed with stage 4 compared to white women.
"We found that there is a consistent pattern of late diagnosis and not receiving recommended treatment for some racial and ethnic groups across all breast cancer subtypes," said Lu Chen, who led the study, in a statement.
The findings strongly illustrate the disparities among racial and ethnic groups. While biology and genes play a major role to cancer risk other social and cultural factors such as lower income and access to healthcare services could be driving the worse outcomes experienced by minority women.
"There are a lot of reasons why these women have a higher incidence of particular subtypes of breast cancer that may have something to do with genetics and biological factors," continued Chen. "But being diagnosed at a later stage and not receiving treatment-these disparities we think have more to do with social, cultural and economic factors."
In addition, Black and Hispanic women were about 30 to 40 percent more likely to receive the wrong treatment for their particular type of cancer.
The study was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute and the abstract can be found here.
