A Deadly Disparity: Blacks, Whites and Cancer | Newsweek Health for Life | Newsweek.com

[Guest guest]

The need

is undeniably urgent. African-American men have the highest incidence of

prostate cancer in the world; they get the disease about 60 percent more often than

white American men. And they're twice as likely as white men to die of it.

Black women face grim statistics as well. Although they get breast cancerless

often than white women, they have a higher breast-cancer mortality rate,

especially at a younger age. That may be because young African-American women

with breast cancer are twice as likely as whites to have triple-negative

tumors—particularly aggressive cancers that lack receptors for estrogen,

progesterone and human epidermal growth factor-2 (HER2). Without those

receptors, anti-estrogen drugs such as tamoxifen and the aromatase inhibitors,

and the anti-HER2 drug Herceptin, have no targets and therefore can't be

used—although combinations of conventional chemotherapy drugs can still

be quite effective.

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