April 19th 2023.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation has revealed that, although the lifetime breast cancer risk for American women is only 13%, Black women account for 12% of those numbers. This alarming statistic is motivating a team of international researchers to take action and suggest that screening begins earlier in our community in order to reduce the number of Black women who succumb to breast cancer.
The study, published today in JAMA Network Open, suggests that clinical trials should be conducted to determine whether screening for Black women should start at the age of 42, instead of the current suggested age of 50. Dr. Mahdi Fallah, an author of the new study and leader of Risk Adapted Cancer Prevention Group at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany, has stated that ‘clinicians and radiologists should consider race and ethnicity when determining the age at which breast cancer screening should begin’.
Unfortunately, Black women have a 4% lower diagnosis rate than white women but an incredibly high 40% higher breast cancer death rate. As a result, the risk-adapted approach to breast cancer screening is being suggested in order to reduce racial disparities in breast cancer mortality, particularly before the recommended age of population screening.
Dr. Rachel Freedman, a breast oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has also noted that guidelines already recommend basing a woman's time to initiate screening on the risk of developing cancer, though race and ethnicity have not traditionally been factors taken into consideration. The American Cancer Society is taking these findings seriously and is in the process of updating their breast cancer screening guidelines to examine the literature for how screening guidelines could differ for women of different racial and ethnic groups, in order to reduce disparities based on risk and outcomes.
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