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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> They did find that early deaths are driving the disparity between outcomes for white and black women. And, they found that the deaths tend to occur soon after the diagnosis. "Most deaths occur in the two or three years after the diagnosis," he said.
So what drives the disparity?
"We think it's mostly access to care [with black women having less access], but we cannot rule out that the biological differences also contribute to the disparity," Menashe said.
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In the second study, Dr. Kathy Albain of Loyola University's Cardinal Bernardin Cancer Center in Maywood, Ill., and her colleagues evaluated nearly 20,000 adult cancer patients with a variety of cancers who were in clinical trials from late 1974 through late 2001, all receiving identical treatments and access to care.
Black patients with breast cancer and other gender-specific cancers had worse survival than white patients, despite identical treatment and follow-up, they noted.
The patients were followed for at least 10 years after treatment. During that time, blacks were 21 percent to 61 percent more likely to die from gender-specific cancers than white patients.
Those findings, the researchers say, cast doubt on the theory that the lower survival rates for certain cancers are due solely to factors such as poverty and poor access to quality health care.
Dr. Mitchell Wong, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine, published a study earlier this year on racial differences in cancer death rates.
"These two articles both suggest that something else is going on [in addition to cancer stage, tumor characteristics or treatment] that leads black patients to have a worse prognosis. We can only guess, but it may be due to differences in tumor biology that science does not yet understand. Then the question is: why do blacks have breast cancer with worse prognosis? It's still speculation, but the second article suggests it may be environmental effects. We cannot rule out genetics either."
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