Breast cancer deaths are falling, but poor women benefit less

Deaths due to breast cancer have been steadily falling for the last 20 years, but new figures from the American Cancer Society show that poor women haven’t benefitted as much as their peers.

Overall, an estimated 230,480 American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and 39,520 women will die from it, according to the American Cancer Society. As of 2008, about 2.6 million women in the United States were living with a history of breast cancer, and many of them were cancer-free.

Until the early 1990s, women who lived in wealthy counties were the most likely to die of breast cancer. But now the death rate is higher in poor counties because women there who develop the disease are less likely to be diagnosed and treated in a timely fashion. For instance, in 2008, only 51.4% of poor women who were at least 40 years old had a mammogram to screen for breast cancer, compared with 72.8% of women in the same age group who were not poor.

“Poor women are now at greater risk for breast cancer death because of less access to screening and better treatments,” Dr. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.

Breast cancer death rates fell in most states between 1998 and 2007, but they remained essentially flat for 14 states: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming. In many of those cases, a high proportion of poor women contributed to the lack of progress, according to the American Cancer Society report.

African American women are less likely than white women to be diagnosed with breast cancer, but they are more likely to be diagnosed with an advanced case of the disease and they are more likely to die from it.

These and other statistics were published Monday in Breast Cancer Statistics, 2011. The report appears in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, which is produced by the American Cancer Society.

The trend hasn’t escaped the notice of doctors in the trenches who treat women for breast cancer. In an essay published in Monday’s Health section, Dr. Thomas J. Lomis, director of the Valley Breast Care and Women’s Health Center in Van Nuys, lamented that money problems prompt many patients to wait several months before seeing a doctor – a delay that means many of them miss “the window of opportunity for cure.”

“The failure of our medical system to ensure that all women realize the benefits of advances in breast cancer prevention and treatment is bewildering,” Lomis wrote. “Each year, millions of dollars are allocated for breast cancer research. Meanwhile, the system does not provide the resources to fully employ tools we already have, resulting in a tragic and needless loss of life.”

You can read the full essay here.