African-American women are more likely than all other women to die from breast cancer, and according to research presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, doctors have gained more insight as to why that disparity exists.
For more than six years, researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, Calif. followed nearly 1,700 breast cancer patients who had been treated for four different subtypes of breast cancer, including luminal A, luminal B, basal-like or HER2-enriched cancer. During that period, about 500 of the patients had died, nearly 300 of them from breast cancer, researchers say.
Among them, black patients were nearly twice as likely as white patients to have died from breast cancer, regardless of the cancer subtype, findings that turn traditional thinking about black women and breast cancer on its head.
"The results seem to indicate that although African-American women are more likely to be diagnosed with less treatable subtypes of breast cancer compared with white women, it is not the only reason they have worse breast cancer mortality," said Candyce Kroenke, M.P.H., Sc.D., research scientist at Kaiser.
The Black-White difference in breast cancer survival rates has been traditionally attributed to the fact that black women are more commonly diagnosed with less treatable tumor subtypes, such as the hard-to-treat triple-negative strain. But even though triple-negative diagnoses prevailed in her study and the likelihood of black women developing the most-treatable luminal A subtype did not, Kroenke says that poor prognosis among blacks appeared consistent across the board.
"African-Americans with breast cancer appeared to have a poorer prognosis regardless of subtype," Kroenke said. "It seems from our data that the black?white breast cancer survival difference cannot be explained entirely by variable breast cancer subtype diagnosis," she went on to say.
Recent genetic profiling has suggested that not all cancer subtypes are created equal and both the tumor makeup and methods for treating them may vary by race.
Yet others maintain that factors such as poverty, silence and racial inequities -- not genetics -- are responsible for high mortality rates. Their efforts have focused less on treatment than on awareness and eliminating cultural barriers to seeking care.
Earlier on HuffPost:
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It’s sure been an interesting week for this of us who cover browsers. Last weekend, we heard that Internet Explorer 11 will probably support WebGL and SPDY. Then, on Tuesday I got an email from Mozilla, asking if I had time to get on the phone with Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich to talk about the organization’s next generation browser engine Servo and the Rust language it is written in. Turns out, Mozilla Research wasn’t just going to work on this alone, but managed to get Samsung to help out with bringing this new engine that’s optimized for multicore and heterogeneous computing architectures to Android and ARM. Given that Mozilla had remained relatively quiet about Servo until now, it was a bit of a surprise that it was now ready to put it into the spotlight. Interestingly, I had heard from Google’s Chrome team earlier in the week and they, too, wanted to talk on Tuesday. Oddly, the PR team was unusually wary about giving me any details before the call (often they’ll give you some background to make sure you can prepare for the call). When Linus Upson, Google’s VP of Engineering, and Alex Komoroske, the product Manager for the Open Web Platform team, told me that Google was going to fork WebKit and launch its own rendering engine Blink based on WebKit, I had to backtrack a few times to make sure I had really heard this right. Outside of a few WebKit insiders, few people expected Google to do this. WebKit is generally seen as a major success and given its dominance on the desktop (thanks to Chrome) and mobile (thanks to Safari), few would call it anything but a massive success. It’s Okay To Blink Google’s WebKit is fork is obviously the most controversial of last week’s announcements and leaks. Google says the reason for its fork is essentially technical, but given that WebKit was, at this point, one of the few projects where Apple and Google were working together relatively closely, it’s hard not to think that there were some political motivations behind this, too, especially given that Google was quite a bit more active in sharing its code back to the project than anybody else. We’ll still have to see what the ramifications of this move are, but I’m pretty optimistic. Sure, it means web developers will have to test their code against yet another