Many Black Breast Cancer Patients Refuse Treatment About 20 percent of Black women with late-stage breast cancer refuse chemotherapy, and about 25 percent refuse radiation therapy, according to a new report. Experts say that if they are to address the high refusal rate, more research is needed to ascertain why they are rejecting the recommended treatments. Further Dr. Monica Rizzo, from Emory University, Atlanta, and colleagues found that about 6 percent to 7 percent of invasive breast cancers diagnosed each year in the United States are at stage III. The racial distribution, however, is far from equal. African-American women are twice as likely as Whites to be diagnosed with the disease. The researchers reviewed data for all women diagnosed with or treated for this disease at one inner-city hospital between 2000 and 2006. “Of 107 stage III breast cancers identified, 93 (86.9 percent) were in African-American women,” according the article in Cancer. “Patients with stage III cancer were significantly younger than patients with other types of stage III disease. Nearly 30 percent of cancers were triple negative tumors, which were most often seen with inflammatory breast cancers.” Twenty percent of the Black women refused chemotherapy and 23.6 percent refused radiotherapy. For non-African American women, the corresponding rates were 21.4 percent and 14.2 percent, according to Cancer. “At our institution, to overcome this high refusal rate, we have implemented a community outreach and internal navigational program to assure adherence to standard multimodalities therapy,” the authors note. “We strongly believe that these prospectively implemented interventions based on this and other studies at our center can significantly improve outcome in these advanced breast cancer patients.”

TAGS: breast cancer, patients, refuse, treatment

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