Black Women Less Likely to Receive Follow-up Treatment After Breast Cancer Surgery

By Will Dunham in the Boston Globe September 3, 2008 Doctors are less likely to give black women radiation therapy after surgery to remove early-stage breast cancer than white women, researchers said on Wednesday, adding to evidence of racial disparities in U.S. medicine. The 37,305 women 65 and older examined in the study had undergone a procedure called a lumpectomy in which doctors removed just the tumor and spared the breast, a procedure less radical than a mastectomy, which removes the entire breast. Standard care for a woman after a lumpectomy is a series of radiation treatments to destroy any remaining cancer cells. While 74 percent of white women in the study were given radiation therapy, only 65 percent of black women got it. The disparities were more acute in certain parts of the country -- for example, parts of the West Coast, South and Northeast -- and nonexistent in some other parts, including parts of the West and Midwest, the study found.