Life
Let us beat Breast Cancer
Black women are twice as likely to die of breast cancer as white women who have breast cancer. One possible reason is that black women tend to have more aggressive tumors, although why this is the case is not yet known.
Breast cancer tends to appear in African-American women at a younger age and in more advanced forms. In fact, studies estimate that 20 percent to 30 percent of breast cancers in African-American women are triple-negative breast cancers. That means the cancers lack estrogen and progesterone receptors and don’t respond to drugs that work by preventing these hormones from reaching the cancer cells.
In older black women, cases of breast cancer decline, but the high death rates persist.
Although deaths as a result of breast cancer have been declining, deaths of African-American women have been dropping at a much slower pace.