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MONDAY, April 17 (HealthDay News) -- Less frequent mammograms may explain why black women tend to be diagnosed with more breast cancers at a later stage, and why more die from the disease compared with white women, researchers report.
"African-American women, particularly, are diagnosed with larger, more aggressive tumors than white women," said study lead author Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, an associate professor of radiology at the University of California, San Francisco. "As a result, their survival is worse."
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According to her team's report, during the 1990s, death rates from breast cancer in the United States decreased with the increase in mammography. This decrease in death rates mostly benefited non-Hispanic white women, however. During the same period, the mortality rate for black women did not change significantly.
The likely reason: White women were more likely than black women to be screened every one to two years, the researchers found.
While 72 percent of white women underwent regular screening, just 63 to 68 percent of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native-American women were screened regularly.
Moreover, black, Hispanic and Asian women were more likely than white women to have never had a mammogram. That means many of these women had their first mammogram only after symptoms or a physical examination led to a breast-cancer diagnosis.
The report appears in the April 18 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
In the study, the UCSF team collected data on more than one million women 40 years of age and older who had at least one mammogram between 1996 and 2002. Among these women, 17,558 cases of breast cancer were diagnosed.
The researchers found that 18 percent of white women with breast cancer were inadequately screened before being diagnosed with breast cancer, compared with 34 percent of black, 24 percent of Hispanic and 27 percent of Native-American women.
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