Incidence of breast cancer among African American women is increasing

For the first time ever, black women are getting breast cancer at the same rate as their white counterparts, the report says.

“The more alcohol you drink, the more your risk of breast cancer increases – but making a decision about whether or how to cut back is more hard if women aren’t sure about the alcohol content of different drinks”.

Among white women, the breast-cancer incidence rate has been stable since 2004, hovering around 135 per 100,000 women.

Men who carry a BRCA2 gene mutation are the most susceptible – however, just as in women, any man could get breast cancer; family history certainly increases risk. Death rates from breast cancer have been declining since about 1989, with larger decreases in women younger than 50. Meanwhile, the obesity rate among white women has stabilized at around 33 percent. Obesity has previously been linked to increased risk of certain types of breast cancers.

“It is a crisis”, Marc Hurlbert, chief mission officer for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, told The New York Times. “Although it is clear that interventions should be made when a patient has a genetic mutation that predisposes them to breast cancer, the cost of universal testing for BRCA mutations far outweighs the benefit”. Among the changes, the new recommendations say all women should begin having yearly mammograms at age 45, and can change to having mammograms every other year beginning at age 55.

It is also to celebrate and remember many dear friends who have sadly passed away and to raise awareness about prevention and early detection of breast cancer. Hispanics also have lower rates, at 91.9 per 100,000.

In 2012, 58 percent of black women were obese, compared to 33 percent of white women.

Diets that are low in fruits and vegetables cause breast cancer. Reasons include lack of regular screening and/or follow up of suspicious results, lack of access to timely, high-quality treatment, and higher proportion of aggressive, harder to treat tumors. At age 55, they recommend women can be screened every other year. Kirsten Moysich, an oncology professor at the Roswell park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY, said that to her, “The bottom line of these statistics is the evidence that the health disparity between African-American and white women in the U.S.is still going strong”.

An essay published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine asks: How can this be?