( A study of more than 2200 women at the...)Afro- American Women Have More Aggressive Breast Cancer,Health

A study of more than 2,200 women at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson in Philadelphia shows that African American women have more advanced breast cancer at the time of diagnosis than Caucasian women.

In addition, African American women tend to have breast cancer tumour types that are more aggressive and have poorer prognoses. The findings, the researchers say, are in line with other recent studies and provide more powerful evidence of the continuing need for early breast cancer screening for African American women and the development of individual treatment strategies.

The research was led by Edith P. Mitchell, M.D., clinical professor of medicine and medical oncology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University and Gloria Morris, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medical oncology at Jefferson Medical College.

They compared clinical, molecular and demographic data from 2,230 African American and Caucasian women diagnosed with breast cancer at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital between 1995 and 2002 with similar data on slightly more than 197,000 women in the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database.

Drs. Mitchell and Morris and their co-workers found that in both databases, African Americans are more likely to have later stage and higher grade tumours at diagnosis, meaning more aggressive and invasive disease, than their Caucasian counterparts. In addition, the breast cancer tumours from African American women had characteristics that predicted worse prognoses and poorer outcomes.

When all stages of breast cancer in the Jefferson patients were analyzed, the results showed that African American women had tumours that were more often estrogen-receptor negative (48 percent versus 37 percent), had higher rates of expression of the growth-promoting gene Ki-67 and higher expression of a tumour inhibiting gene, p53. A more aggressive type
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