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Breast Cancer Often Harder To Treat In Black Women

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The Associated Press

Published: September 7, 2007

A new study gives a possible explanation for why breast cancer is more deadly in black women: they are more likely to have tumors that do not respond to the hormone-based treatments that help many others with the disease.

The study is the largest yet to link a biological factor to the racial disparity, which also has been blamed on black women getting fewer mammograms and less aggressive treatment.

'This puts biology more to the forefront,' said Julie Gralow, a cancer specialist at the University of Washington School of Medicine familiar with the work.

The study was led by M. Catherine Lee of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and is to be presented at a conference starting today in San Francisco, organized by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and other cancer groups.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in American women. An estimated 178,480 new cases and 40,460 deaths from it are expected in the United States this year.

Blacks are less likely than whites to develop breast cancer but are more likely to die from it, doctors long have known. Blacks also are diagnosed at younger ages and at later stages of disease.

Researchers for the first time used the National Cancer Data Base, a tumor registry maintained by the American College of Surgeons, to explore these issues, using more than 170,000 cases diagnosed in 1998. Ten percent were in black women.

The study focused on the 95,500 women whose cancers were invasive rather than still confined to a milk duct. About 39 percent of such tumors in black women were estrogen receptor-negative, or ER-negative, compared with 22 percent of those in white women.

Estrogen helps tumors grow. Drugs that block this hormone, like tamoxifen and a newer class of medications called aromatase inhibitors, work against these cancers.

ER-negative tumors are resistant to such therapies and harder to treat. Other tools such as chemotherapy, radiation and targeted biological drugs then become more important for such women, and doctors should consider this when they evaluate black women with the disease, Lee said.

In the study, ER-negative tumors were more common in black women at every stage of disease and at all ages.

For example, only 17 percent of early stage tumors in white women were ER-negative, but 31 percent in black women were. Of the most advanced cancers, 31 percent in whites and 46 percent in blacks were ER-negative.

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