Source: Reuters

Date: 04/24/06

Headline: Racial difference in breast cancer multifactorial

African American women, regardless of their socioeconomic status, have a significant and independent risk of having a worse breast cancer outcome compared with white women, according to a combined analysis of several clinical trials. This suggests that socioeconomic disparities alone do not explain the higher breast cancer mortality among African American women, and that other factors, such as genetics, tumor biology and cultural effects, need to be investigated.