Race and Breast Cancer.
Basal-like tumor. Image: Chuck Perou
by Margarite Nathe
If you are a young African American woman who develops breast cancer,” says medical oncologist Lisa Carey, “you are more than twice as likely to develop one of the more aggressive subtypes—the basal-like subtype. And you’re less likely to develop the least aggressive subtype.”
In June, Carey and her colleagues found that premenopausal black women who develop breast cancer are more likely to have this basal-like subtype, which is estrogen receptor and human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2) negative. Because the only targeted treatments for breast cancer target the estrogen and HER2 pathways, chemotherapy is the only option for these patients.
Scientists don’t yet know why younger black women are more likely to develop deadlier breast cancers, Carey says.
Carey is now involved in a clinical trial that “looks at a targeted therapy for the basal-like subtype,” she says. At the end of the trial, which will close in the next year or two, the researchers may be a step closer to developing more targeted breast cancer treatments.
“My grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer in the 1960s,” Carey says. “At that time, sixty percent of the women who developed breast cancer died from it. Now it’s about twenty percent. There’s not one thing that we’ve done to help women with breast cancer that didn’t come out of a clinical trial.”
Lisa Carey, lead author of the study, is medical director of the UNC Breast Center and a Lineberger clinical faculty member. Study co-authors from Carolina are Charles Perou, Robert Millikan, Chad Livasy, Lynn Dressler, David Cowan, H. Shelton Earp, Kathleen Conway, and Melissa Troester.
