Regular mammography screening can help narrow the breast cancer gap between black and white women, according to a study conducted by Chicago researchers and published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.
Earlier studies have shown that black women in Chicago are more than twice as likely to die of breast cancer compared to white women. They're also more likely to have larger and more biologically aggressive tumors, and to reach the disease's later stages more often than white women, according to senior author Dr. David Ansell, chief medical officer at Rush University Medical Center.
But Ansell's team found that when women of both races received regular breast cancer screening, i.e., a mammogram within two years of breast cancer diagnosis, there was no difference in the rate of how many women presented in the disease's later stages, according to a Rush University statement on the study.
The study included 1,642 women diagnosed with breast cancer from January 2001 to December 2006 at Rush University Medical Center and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Of this group, 980 were regularly screened and 662 were irregularly screened (Breast Cancer Res Treat, August 2012, Vol. 135:2, pp. 549-553).
Ansell and colleagues found that women screened regularly, regardless of race, were more likely to have hormone-receptor-positive breast cancers than those who did not receive regular screenings. This finding was statistically significant in black women, suggesting that early detection can blunt the development of negative prognostic biological characteristics in some women, according to the researchers.
