Black Women at Risk for Triple Threat Breast Cancer

Black Woman Charles Shapiro, Fotolia

Is It About Race, Poverty, and Culture?
"I think, actually, genetics gets us to look beyond race," said Dr Fumi Olopade, of the University of Chicago. Black women in Nigeria, Olopade's home country, were studied and found to have a genetic predisposition for breast cancer that is aggressive, resistant to standard drug treatment, and targets women in their twenties and thirties. Black women 50 and younger are 77 percent more likely to die from this breast cancer than white women at any age. Dr. Harold Freeman of the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention says that poverty, culture and social injustice are more to blame than genetics.

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