Poorer Prognosis for Black Women with Uterine Tumors

Racial disparity between black and white females for cancer survival sustained over time

MONDAY, Feb. 16 (HealthDay News) -- Black women with uterine corpus tumors have a higher likelihood of mortality compared with white women, revealing a racial disparity that has continued over time, according to research published online Feb. 9 in Cancer.

Jason D. Wright, M.D., of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, and colleagues examined outcomes of women from the 1988-2004 Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) national database. A total of 80,915 women with uterine neoplasms were stratified according to year of diagnosis into three groups (1988-1993, 1994-1998 and 1999-2004).

Black women were found to be significantly younger and experienced more advanced-stage tumors that were more likely to be aggressive, non-endometrioid variants, the researchers report. When black and white women were matched according to prognostic variables, black women were 60 percent more likely to die from a cancer-related death, the investigators found. This increased mortality risk was evident over time, as survival was continuously worse for black women across all three time stratification groups.

"Our findings reveal that black women with uterine corpus tumors are more likely to die from their disease than white women, and this survival difference has persisted over time," the authors conclude. "Further work to delineate factors that impair survival in black women with uterine corpus tumors is clearly needed."

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