Deadly breast cancer linked to race

African American women who contract breast cancer before reaching menopause are more than twice as likely as white women to have an aggressive, deadlier form of the disease, researchers have found.

Higher rates of basal-like cancer among younger black women add another explanation to why blacks are at greater risk of fatal breast cancer than whites, despite a lower overall risk of the disease, the study said.

“We actually don’t know why younger African American women are more prone to this kind of aggressive form of breast cancer. That actually is a challenge for us,” said study author Dr. Lisa Carey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In the study of 500 breast cancer cases, 39% of black women patients had the basal-like form of the disease, compared with 16% of the white women of any age and 14% of post-menopausal black women. The report was published in the June 7 Journal of the American Medical Assn.