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Breast Cancer Calculator To Reflect Risk For Blacks

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The Associated Press

Published: November 28, 2007

WASHINGTON - A widely used tool for predicting a woman's risk of breast cancer is getting an update to better reflect black women's risk.

At issue is the National Cancer Institute's online risk calculator that lets women answer a few questions and learn their odds of getting breast cancer within five years.

But the calculator has a caveat: It was created using studies of breast cancer in white women. A warning flashes telling nonwhite women that the answer they are about to get comes with some uncertainty.

Now scientists are updating the calculations to reflect newer data on black women and cancer.

It turns out the original calculator had been slightly underestimating risk for black women 45 and older - and slightly overestimating risk for younger black women, institute researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Mitchell Gail and colleagues re-examined the records of 20,000 black women who were screened for a government study comparing cancer-protective drugs.

Using the old calculator, these women's average risk was 1.19 percent. Using the new one, their average risk was 1.75 percent, a small difference.

But overall, just 14 percent of these women qualified for the study using the old risk calculator. Had the new one been in use, 30 percent would have qualified - an important difference, Gail concluded.

The NCI will have its online risk calculator (www.cancer .gov/bcrisktool) updated with the new statistics for black women by spring, Gail said.

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