A new study finds African-American women are more likely than Caucasian women to have delays in diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. Researchers from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in collaboration with colleagues from Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say factors such as income, insurance, and the means of detection account for some but not all of the race-related delays in breast cancer treatment. The study was published in the journal Cancer.

African-American women are more likely to die of breast cancer than Caucasian women. Access to care, socioeconomic status, and tumor biology are thought to contribute to racial differences in mortality. Whether race itself is associated with a delay in treatment has been scarcely studied and the results are inconsistent. Treatment delays of three months or more from the onset of symptoms have been linked to lower rates of survival from breast cancer.

In the first study to examine differences between African-American and Caucasian women in diagnosis and treatment delays and delays from consultation to treatment, researchers investigated 251 African-American and 580 Caucasian women with breast cancer in Atlanta who were between the ages of 20 to 54 years old at the time of their diagnosis.

The investigators found most women began receiving treatment within two months of their diagnosis. But African-American women were more likely than Caucasians to have longer delays in diagnosis and treatment. The study found 22.4 percent of African-American women and 14.3 percent of Caucasian women reported delays of three months or more from the time of medical consultation to initiation of treatment.

Factors that appeared to contribute to the race-associated delays included method of breast cancer detection, poverty index, insurance status, marital status, as well as mammography history. Improvements in access to health care may help reduce racial differences in medical delays for breast cancer, the investigators conjecture, but more research is needed to specifically characterize the reasons for the diagnosis and treatment delays they observed.

SOURCE:
Cancer, April 15, 2004