The Washington Post had a feature on the recent realization in the medical community that breast cancer rates and severity have been underestimated for Black women.
Breast Cancer Risk Underestimated for Blacks, Study Says – washingtonpost.com
The new findings, published online yesterday by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, are the latest revelation about how breast cancer and other diseases can affect racial groups differently. A growing body of evidence suggests that breast cancer tends to be much more aggressive and deadly among black women, which could help explain why they are more likely to die from it even though fewer of them get it. More than 19,000 African American women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, and nearly 6,000 die from it.
"This is extremely significant," said Lovell A. Jones, director of the Center for Research on Minority Health at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. "This is emblematic of a broader problem, which is: We tend to make the assumption that one size fits all. One size does not fit all."
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