Breast cancer rising among younger women and Asian Americans, report finds

Breast cancer patients have had dramatic increases in their survival rate in the last twenty years, but diagnosis rates are increasing, particularly among women below the age of 40, says a publication by the American Cancer society on Tuesday.

This new report reveals the trend in that breast cancer mortality has declined by 44 percent since the late 1980s. Breast cancer incidences on the other hand have been rising by 1% per year from 2012. Among young females, the annual raise has also been higher — 1.4 per cent per year — starting from 2021. 

“That is very alarming because we know that screening only starts at age 40,” said Dr. Sonya Reid, a breast medical oncologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, non-affiliated with the report. “It is not just one or two people of colour suffering from it, every race is now involved and therefore cannot be attributed to bloodline issues.”

However there were variations within some of the groups. Since 2000, breast cancer incidence among Asian American and Pacific Islander women under 50 years of age has risen by 50 percent. AAPI women under 50 have joined the ranks of Black, Hispanic and American Indian and Alaska Native women in the upswing of breast cancer incidence. The findings also revealed that in 2000, a year that AAPI women under the age of fifty. 

Why more women under 50 are receiving a breast cancer diagnosis is unknown, but Reid said, environmental carcinogens in food, air or water may play a role, in addition to more obese individuals and fewer exercising or eating a healthy diet – similar to what is being seen in younger patients developing colon cancer. 

This means that the reason behind increase in breast cancer among younger women could be caused by a single factor or a combination of them as pointed out by Dr. Wendy Wilcox, chief women’s health officer at New York City Health + Hospitals.

“Well there is all kinds of speculation as to why but until said it’s being looked in to, who knows,” Wilcox said. 

The report also presented another racial difference that has endured since 1975 — Black women remain at a greater risk of dying from any kind of breast cancer than White women.

“To see a 44% decreased mortality is very satisfying, but these gains have not been realized for all groups,” said Dr William Dahut, chief scientific officer for the American Cancer Society, during a media briefing on Monday. 

This was not always the case, he said: In 1970 Black and white women were observed to have equal mortality from breast cancer. Black women are 5% less likely to incidence breast cancer compared with white women today but 39% of Black women die from breast cancer. Such disparity is observed, according to the American Cancer Society researchers, in even the most treatable types of breast cancer. 

Until recently, the community has attributed the difference to the fact that more black women have triple-negative breast cancer However, this signifies that black women are more likely to die from all types of breast cancer, Reid said. “All these changes that have occurred are actually truly reflected in therapeutic advancements and early diagnosis, and we understand that if there is variation in the access to these changes, these discrepancies will widen.”

The mortality rate of breast cancer among American Indian and Alaska Native women is 6% higher than that found among White women, though AI/AN women have a 10% lower incidence of getting the disease, the report said. Only slightly more than half of these women aged 40 and over had had a mammogram in the past two years, though nearly 70 percent of white women had one. The report also noted that Hispanic women were less likely to be screened than white women. 

While white women are in the mid-forties when it comes to the average age of breast cancer diagnosis, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, American Indian and Alaska Natives, Black and Hispanic women are all at greater risk of developing breast cancer every year at a younger age, according to the report. Despite this, AAPI and Hispanic ladies are as likely as white women to die from the cause. 

‘To eliminate disparities, the nation will have to increase early-detection access and the best cancer care,’ Wilcox said. 

It embarrassed us all collectively, but she was deft; putting it in perspective: “Health care dollars are not distributed fairly amongst every individual in our country,” she said. 

For those with insurance, however, the choice is completely different from state to state and even from insurance company to insurance company, and a person’s capacity to take a sick leave from work for a mammography or care as well as proximity to a cancer center also remain defining roles to the accessibility of the screening, according to Wilcox. Age, family and personal history, and genetics will also decide when a man’s family, and he himself, needs to go for breast cancer screening. 

“So, for future, let’s ensure that we have availability of good treatments for all of our patietns,” Reid added. As we have noted, there was no change in the gap favouring Blacks even if the drugs today are more effective. And another drug is not going to do it.”