LETHAL BREAST CANCER RATE HIGHER IN YOUNG BLACKS

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LETHAL BREAST CANCER RATE HIGHER IN YOUNG BLACKS
24 June 2006 - University of Chicago

Young black women with breast cancer are more prone than whites or older blacks to develop a type of tumor with genetic traits that make it especially deadly and hard to treat, a study has found.

Among premenopausal black women with breast cancer, 39 percent had the more dangerous kind, called a "basal-like" subtype, compared with only 14 percent of older black women and 16 percent of non-black women of any age. Researchers are not sure why.

The study, being published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to measure how common the different genetic subtypes of breast tumors are in American women and to sort the subtypes by race. The authors said more research is needed to test their conclusions.

The finding has no immediate effect on treatment because there is no treatment that specifically targets basal-like cancer. But scientists are trying to create drugs to zero in on it.

The study helps explain something that was already known: Although breast cancer is less common in blacks than whites, when black women develop the disease they are more likely to die from it, especially if they are under 50. Among those younger women, the breast cancer death rate in blacks is 11 per 100,000, in contrast with 6.3 in whites.

The new data about tumor types are not the whole story, researchers say, because some of the disparity may also come from a lack of access to health care among blacks or differences in nutrition, personal habits or environmental exposures.

The genetic discovery is "somewhat alarming" but also a "good thing" because it exposes details about the cancer that should help doctors identify specific drugs to fight it, said the study's first author, Dr. Lisa Carey, the medical director of the University of North Carolina-Lineberger breast center.

Dr. Olufunmilayo Olopade, director of the center for clinical cancer genetics at the University of Chicago, said she had found high rates of basal-like tumors in young women in Nigeria and Senegal, most of whom died. In many, the disease ran in their families.

The work has not yet been published, but she said the message to black women, and to women of all races, was that if their mothers, sisters or daughters developed breast cancer at an early age, they needed to start screening for it well before age 40.

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About: University of Chicago
The University of Chicago was founded in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. The land for the new university, in the recently annexed suburb of Hyde Park, was donated by Marshall Field, owner of the Chicago department store that bears his name.

In 1929, Robert Hutchins became the University's fifth president. During his tenure, Hutchins established many of the undergraduate curricular innovations that the University is known for today. These included a curriculum dedicated specifically to interdisciplinary education, comprehensive examinations instead of course grades, courses focused on the study of original documents and classic works, and an emphasis on discussion, rather than lectures.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the University began to add modern buildings to the formerly all-Gothic campus.

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