IPPCR - Health Disparities Research: Better Health Outcomes for All Part 2 of 4

>> Larissa Avilés-Santa: In this first example, the investigators focused on reporting breast cancer pathological differences and similarities among women from different racial and ethnic groups. They examined a large U.S. cancer database. And they included data from women who were diagnosed with breast cancer from 2004 to 2011. From that large cohort or sample,

70 percent of the women were non-white. Upon looking at the characteristics of women with Stage I cancer from that sample, we see that at this lowest stage of breast cancer, Black women had the lowest prevalence. That is with 37 percent. The authors also reported that death at this stage of breast cancer was very low.

However, it was double the rate among Black women. They did not observe any differences in annual income. So, with this information, can we state that there are any health or healthcare disparities? We don't know yet. Let's look at more information. In this other table, investigators are illustrating the prevalence of Stage IV breast cancer,

which is the most advanced stage, and particularly, or specifically, women who have Stage IV, but the tumors but the tumors are small or less than 2 cm in size. And what they observed was that although the prevalence of this specific phenotype, or cluster of characteristics of breast cancer, Black women had the highest prevalence among all women.

Not only that, they also looked at whether the women had positive nodes. And that's an indicator of metastasis. And Black women had the highest prevalence of this type of presentation. They also looked at whether the tumors had estrogen receptors, or they were triple-negative receptors. And most of the -- I'm sorry -- the prevalence of the tumors