Black Women Have Lower Breast Cancer Survival

SCIENCE NEWS
December 18, 2006
Black women have lower breast cancer survival

By Ed Stoddard

DALLAS (Reuters) - Black women with early-stage breast cancer have lower survival rates than their white counterparts even after taking into account variables such as tumor size and socioeconomic differences, researchers said.

"I think it's due to biological factors in the actual cancer, and this means that race may be a surrogate for a more adverse molecular profile within the cancer," said Dr. Kathy Albain, the study's senior researcher and a professor of medicine at Loyola University Chicago Medical Center.

The study, conducted by the Committee on Special Populations of the Southwest Oncology Group that Albain chairs, used databases from two national clinical trials done in the early 1990s.read more