A number of prior studies have shown that African-American women generally perform worse when it comes to breast cancer survival. This is true even after taking into consideration such factors as tumor size and socioeconomic differences, according to a new study.

"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.

This study utilized database from two prior clinical trials done in the early part of 1990s.

The study included 317 pairs of women -- 317 black and 317 white. All these patients had been treated for early-stage breast cancer with chemotherapy and who had been followed after therapy over 10 years.

The survival rate of the white women after 10 years was 86 percent in comparison to 76 percent for the black women.

All the women had the same tumor stage and were treated identically. The potential influence of age, tumor differences, education level and socioeconomic status also was considered.

The study then took into account the fact that black women were more likely to have discontinued therapy early, to have missed appointments or delayed therapy and had lower initial white blood cell counts. But they had the same relative doses of total chemotherapy delivered during therapy.

Even after adjusting for all of these variables, the survival rate of black women remained worse.


Posted by: Betsy    Source

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