African-American Breast Cancer Victims Have Low Survival Rate

October 1, 2015

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A new study indicates that African-American women are more likely that Caucasian women to die from breast cancer because of genetic differences.

In a study published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center discovered that black females develop more aggressive tumors which is one of the reasons that the survival rate for blacks is lower.

Black women with breast cancer in the United States are 40 percent more likely to die from their disease than white women.

“Our study adds important pieces to the puzzle of why African-American women with breast cancer are less likely to survive,” says the study’s senior author, Aditya Bardia, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, according to Health24.com.

The investigators studied genetic differences between the tumors of 105 black women and 664 white women diagnosed with cancer between 1988 and 2013. Badia believes the report can lead to advances in treating black women battling breast cancer. “If our findings are confirmed by additional studies,” she says, “they may open doors to the development of targeted therapies against the tumor subtypes more likely to affect African-Americans, and potentially help reduce racial disparities in breast cancer.”