Black women die at rates 40 percent higher than white women. They are also more likely than white women to be diagnosed with breast cancer under the age of 50 and to get the rare and aggressive triple-negative subtype of the disease.
The reasons for the disparities are complicated, involving everything from late diagnoses to doctors dismissing patient symptoms to a lack of representation in cancer cure research.
Racial disparities exist in all different kinds of cancer diagnoses, but research has shown they didn’t always exist in breast cancer.
Only over the last 15 to 20 years has the divergence in mortality begun to appear, and it remains unclear if this is due to one specific reason or a combination of factors.
Clinical trials might be able to provide important information about what’s behind Black patients’ higher mortality rates and how best to treat them — but Black women have been excluded from those trials.
Lisa R. Hayes, executive director of Pink-4-Ever Ending Disparities, an organization dedicated to reducing the disparities in breast cancer, said it will take effort from everyone, including patients.
But building trust will be a major hurdle, she said.
“One of the big elephants in the room is just distrust and fear of the medical system that is not just for clinical trials, but for across many facets of the health environment due to the historical treatment of Black people as it relates to research and access to health care,” Hayes said. “That’s a challenge that has to be overcome by the system.”
Read the rest of the story here, and the rest of The Hill’s series on breast cancer
