A major study on African Americans and cancer; even with equal care they are more likely to die of some cancers than whites

Blacks Getting Equal Health Care Are Still More Likely to Die From Some Cancers – washingtonpost.com

In the new study, Albain and her colleagues used data collected from about 19,457 patients between 1974 and 2001 by the Southwest Oncology Group, a National Cancer Institute-funded national cooperative of clinical trials. Because all patients in the studies received the same treatment, if poverty and other socioeconomic factors were to blame, then differences in survival should remain constant across all cancers, the researchers reasoned.

A detailed analysis of the data found no statistically significant association between race and survival for lung and colon cancer — two of the most common forms of cancer — or for leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma.

But African Americans were still 49 percent more likely than whites to die from early-stage postmenopausal breast cancer, 41 percent more likely to die from early-stage premenopausal breast cancer, 61 percent more likely to die from advanced ovarian cancer and 21 percent more likely to die from advanced prostate cancer.

Because all the cancers for which the disparity persisted were related to gender, the findings suggest that the survival gap may be the result of a complex interaction of differences in the biology of the tumors and inherited variations in genes that control metabolism of drugs and hormones, Albain said.