Disparity Matters

Less access to medical care is a significant issue for African American women diagnosed with breast cancer, says Worta McCaskill-Stevens (above). They come into treatment very late in the disease, and their rate of aggressive, triple-negative breast cancer—the subtype with the poorest prognosis—is higher than in other racial groups. See “Improving outcomes for African American […]

Black women in North Carolina with breast cancer encounter longer waits for treatment initiation and a longer duration of treatment compared with white women, according to a new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Delay of treatment was defined as more than 60 days after diagnosis. Black women at both high

Differential access to healthcare is an important contributor to breast cancer disparities in the United States. Access to care varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, in part due to historical patterns of segregation and structural racism. It also varies from city to city because of systems-based factors such as state policy decisions, differential Medicaid coverage and

The hotspots for breast cancer deaths in Black women from 2000 to 2015 were 119 counties mostly in the Southern region of the country, including clusters in the Mississippi Valley River region, coastal Carolinas and the three Georgia counties of Putnam, Jasper and Morgan clustered in the middle of the state. The 83 hotspots for

Hispanic women were significantly more likely to survive breast cancer after lumpectomies or mastectomies than Black or white women during 2004 and 2014. Researchers at Washington University and Duke University analyzed the medical records in the National Cancer Institute database of more 900,000 women treated for breast cancer and found that Hispanic women were about