Cancer Treatment of Black Women Delayed

African-American women experience the longest diagnostic, treatment and clinical delay of breast-cancer treatment, finds a U.S. study.

This may explain why African-American women have higher death rates from breast cancer, compared to white women — even though white women have the highest incidence of breast cancer, according to Drs. Sherri Sheinfeld Gorin and Suzanne J. Smith of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian.

Using data from more than 49,000 women enrolled in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results-Medicare database, the researchers found that African-American women experience average delays of 29 days for diagnosis and 20 days for treatment, according to the study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The researchers believe that the delays may be caused by cultural variations in approaches to cancer detection and follow-up for abnormal findings, including attitudes or beliefs toward the causes of cancer and methods of detection and treatment.

They also believe that patients’ psychosocial factors, such as fear and anxiety, a sense of fatalism, perceived risk, misunderstanding, body image, the competing demands of caring for others, and social norms, may also delay diagnostic evaluation and treatment.