Why Are African American Women Dying?
When she told her doctors about an amber nipple discharge, 33-year-old Adriene McPhatter was assured she was too young to have to worry about it. At her insistence, a mammogram was performed and revealed abnormal calcifications, but those were dismissed as inconsequential. Nine months later, after seeing another doctor, McPhatter was prescribed a biopsywhich confirmed cancer. Since the early 1980s, increased mammography screening has led to earlier breast-cancer detection, and mortality rates for American women have declined. Yet African American women, such as McPhatter, have benefited far less from these advances than have white women. According to a 1999 study reported in Archives of Family Medicine, the chance of dying from breast cancer was 16 percent higher among African American women than white women in 1990and that differential rose to 29 percent by 1995. African American women are less likely than white women to develop breast cancer, but they are less likely to survive it. O
