Black women with breast cancer are six times more likely than White women to have a distant spread of their cancer, regardless of their age or the stage of their cancer at diagnosis. This could be one reason why Black women are more likely to die f breast cancer than White women.
Researchers at Mount Sinai in New York studied the medical records of 441 women who participated in a clinical trial. Black women were much more likely than White women to have an advanced stage of breast cancer at diagnosis. But even when that was taken into account, Black patients were much more likely to have distant metastases of their cancer.
- See “Age and Stage at Breast Cancer Diagnosis Don’t Account for Racial Disparities in Distant Metastases” by Walter Alexander on the Cancer Therapy Advisor website (June 15, 2021)
- See the abstract of the study “Distant metastases after diagnosis: Racial disparities in breast cancer outcomes” by Julia Blanter et al.
