“The rate of uterine cancer is increasing very significantly—about 2.5% every year—in Black women, but it’s not increasing significantly in White women,” says Cortney Eakin, MD of the University of California at Los Angeles.
“If those were all low-risk, grade 1, endometrioid tumors that typically have a good prognosis, that’s one thing. But it turns out Black women are getting higher-risk cancers.”
“What is driving this? Race is not just Black and White. Genetically at our core, we’re much more similar than we think. Race is a proxy for so many other social determinants of health and environmental factors.
Are there environmental factors, are there epigenetic factors, or are there biomarkers that are impacting this population at a higher rate than they’re impacting other populations that can explain why Black women are being diagnosed with higher-risk cancers?
Those are the questions that we need to start asking ourselves so we can start to drive down this disparity,” says Eakin.
See “Increasing Rate of High-Risk Endometrial Cancer in Black Women Prompts Questions Into Underlying Causes” by Ryan Scott on the OncLive website (January 30, 2022)
