Posted on 06/06/2006 9:47:34 PM PDT by neverdem
Young black women with breast cancer are more prone than whites or older blacks to develop a type of tumor with genetic traits that make it especially deadly and hard to treat, a study has found.
Among premenopausal black women with breast cancer, 39 percent had the more dangerous kind, called a "basal like" subtype, compared with only 14 percent of older black women and 16 percent of nonblack women of any age. Researchers are not sure why.
The study, being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to measure how common the different genetic subtypes of breast tumors are in American women, and to sort the subtypes by race. The authors said more research was needed to test their conclusions.
The finding has no immediate effect on treatment, because there is no treatment that specifically concentrates on basal-like cancer. But scientists are trying to create drugs that will zero in on it.
The study helps explain something that was already known: although breast cancer is less common in blacks than whites, when black women do develop the disease, they are more likely to die from it, especially if they are under 50. Among those younger women, the breast cancer death rate in blacks is 11 per 100,000, compared with only 6.3 in whites.
The new data about tumor types is not the whole
--snip--
The work has not yet been published, but Dr. Olopade said the message to black women, and to women of all races, was that if their mothers, sisters or daughters developed breast cancer at an early age, they needed to start screening for it well before age 40, to seek genetic counseling and to consider preventive drugs and perhaps preventive surgery if they proved to be at high risk....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Otherwise, as I usually do, I link the printer friendly pages if possible.
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I wonder what the demographics look like. There is now some pretty well settled science that shows Afro Americans, because of their skin pigment, are usually somewhat deficient in Vitamin D and thus more prone to prostate and breast cancers.
That's not surprising.
Biochemistry and Physiology of Vitamin D
"This model is based on the concept that, in terms of its structure and mode of action, vitamin D is similar to the classic steroid hormones, e.g. aldosterone, testosterone, estradiol, progesterone, cortisol, and ecdysterone."
IMHO, the association of prostate cancer with testosterone is even stronger. AFAIK, no eunuchs have ever been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
The role of Combined Androgen Blockade (CAB)
Blacks also have much lower prevalance of osteoporosis which is thought to be due to variations in sex hormone levels.
Osteoporosis Prevention, Diagnosis, and Therapy
"The probability that a 50-year-old will have a hip fracture during his or her lifetime is 14 percent for a white female and 5 to 6 percent for a white male. The risk for African Americans is much lower at 6 percent and 3 percent for 50-year-old women and men, respectively."
CYP3A4, CYP3A5, and CYP3A43 Genotypes and Haplotypes in the Etiology and Severity of Prostate Cancer
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