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Biological cause of BlackWomen's Deadly CancerSeptember 6, 2007A new study gives a possible explanation for why breastcancer is more deadly in black women: They are morelikely to have tumors that do not respond to the hormonebasedtreatments that help many others with the disease.The study is the largest yet to link a biological factor tothe racial disparity, which also has been blamed on blackwomen getting fewer mammograms and less aggressivetreatment.“This puts biology more to the forefront,” said Dr. JulieGralow, a cancer specialist at the University ofWashington School of Medicine familiar with the work.“It’s not just access to care, access to treatment and otherfactors that have been implicated in the past.”The study was led by Dr. M. Catherine Lee of theUniversity of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Centerand is to be presented at a conference starting Friday inSan Francisco, organized by the American Society ofClinical Oncology and other cancer groups.Breast cancer is the most common cancer in Americanwomen. An estimated 178,480 new cases and 40,460deaths from it are expected in the United States this year.More likely to dieBlacks are less likely than whites to develop breast cancerbut are more likely to die from it, doctors have longknown. Blacks also are diagnosed at younger ages and atlater stages of disease.Researchers for the first time used the National CancerData Base, a tumor registry maintained by the AmericanCollege of Surgeons, to explore these issues, using morethan 170,000 cases diagnosed in 1998. Ten percent werein black women.The study focused on the 95,500 women whose cancerswere invasive rather than still confined to a milk duct.About 39 percent of such tumors in black women wereestrogen receptor-negative, or ER-negative, comparedwith 22 percent of those in white women.Estrogen helps tumors grow. Drugs that block thishormone, like tamoxifen and a newer class of medicationscalled aromatase inhibitors, work against these cancers.ER-negative tumors are resistant to such therapies andharder to treat. Other tools like chemotherapy, radiationand targeted biological drugs then become moreimportant for such women, and doctors should considerthis when they evaluate black women with the disease,63-- Traditional African Clinic July 2013Lee said.In the study, ER-negative tumors were more common inblack women at every stage of disease and at all ages.For example, only 17 percent of early stage tumors inwhite women were ER-negative, but 31 percent in blackwomen were. Of the most advanced cancers, 31 percentin whites and 46 percent in blacks were ER-negative.Cancer more advanced when diagnosedEchoing previous research, the new study found thatblack women were diagnosed at younger ages — anaverage of 57 years old versus 62 for white women —and with more advanced disease: Only 29 percent hadearly stage tumors versus 42 percent of white women.They also had larger tumors and more cell traits that aresigns of a poor prognosis.Smaller studies have suggested biological differencesbetween breast cancer in blacks and whites. Earlier thisyear, the Carolina Breast Cancer Study found that youngblack women were more likely to have an aggressiveform called the basal-like subtype.Last fall, two studies by researchers from the Universityof Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center found thatblack women were more likely to have larger, laterstagetumors and lower survival rates than Hispanic andwhite women given similar treatments.But these findings do not mean that differences inscreening and health care are not contributing to thetrend, especially in certain parts of the country, said Dr.Wendy Woodward, a breast cancer specialist at M.D.Anderson.“You really have to kind of go at the problem from allangles. If you solve the access problem and womencome in and you don’t have an adequate therapy forthem, you haven’t taken a step forward,” she said.Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of theAmerican Cancer Society, agreed. Racial disparity inbreast cancer survival did not appear until the mid-1980s, suggesting that much of it is due to lack ofscreening mammograms and access to care, he said.http://www.nbcnews.com/health/biological-cause-blackwomens-deadly-cancer-1C9468040☻☻☻☻☻