Across Racial Groups, Endometrial Cancer Incidence on the Rise

Endometrial cancer incidence rates increased for all racial/ethnic subgroups during the study period.

Study researchers said that every five years of taking birth control pills was linked with a 24% decline in the risk of cancer. Around 40% of women who did not get diagnosed with the cancer had taken the pills for more than four years.

Researchers from Wayne State University in Detroit have conducted a study which looked at endometrial cancer cases in relation with race and ethnicity. In addition, we believe that there are differences in tumor biology that we have yet to identify that make the disease more aggressive in black women.

For all stages and tumor subtypes other than low-grade endometrioid tumors, non-Hispanic black women faced significantly greater mortality rates compared with non-Hispanic white women (mortality rate ratio [mRR] = 1.55; 95% CI, 1.5-1.61).

Finally, the study authors contribute, “Endometrial cancer incidence is increasing for all women, particularly the aggressive subtypes”.

Oral contraceptives most commonly prescribed by physicians feature man-made versions of progesterone and estrogen, two natural hormones produced by the female body.

The NCI explained that endometrial cancer typically afflicts 60-year-old women who are at the end of their years of reproduction. They found that black women had poorer chances of survival across all stages of the disease – and for the deadliest forms of this cancer, black women faced a death risk at least double that of their white counterparts.

Beral and her team studied medical data gathered from 27,276 women who developed endometrial tumors and an additional 115,743 who did not in order to determine the link between the cancer and the use of birth control pills.

In all subgroups, the highest percentage of women were diagnosed between the ages of 60 years to 69 years. The researchers said that in the 1960s, first oral contraceptive was introduced and around 400 million women in high-income countries alone have used the pills. Oral contraceptive use was associated with 31 percent lower lifetime risk of developing endometrial carcinomas, which are more common. “Our results show clearly, for the first time, that the protective effect of the pill on endometrial cancer lasts for over 30 years”, Beral said as told by Reuters. Non-Hispanic white women comprised the largest racial/ethnic subgroup in the population (n = 90,621), followed by Hispanic women (n = 11,386), non-Hispanic black women (n = 10,365) and Asian women (n = 8,141). The pills were also associated with a 17 percent lower risk of less common sarcomas, which start in the uterine muscle and supportive tissue.

The reduction of risk to endometrial cancer linked to the use of oral contraceptives depended on the type of tumor. The positive effect continues even after more than three decades of contraceptive treatment.