Latinas Less Likely to Get Treated for Breast Cancer

Latina women are less likely to receive breast cancer care because health care providers are less likely to recommend treatments.  This disparity for Latinas and African-American women does not exist for white women.  What this basically means is that doctors, the majority of whom are white, don’t feel compelled to refer Latinas with breast cancer for further treatment.

Recent research found that this holds steady even when economic/social class and access to health insurance is factored into the statistics.  The study evaluated information for more than 662,000 white, African-American and Latina women with invasive breast cancer from 1998 to 2005 from the U.S. National Cancer Data Base.

Database information included women who were 86% white, 10% African-American and 4% Latina.

From the story:  “…black women had lower odds of getting recommended treatments — interventions such as mastectomy or breast-conserving therapy, chemotherapy and hormone therapy (such as aromatase inhibitor drugs to reduce recurrence risk…and Hispanic women were less likely than white women to get hormonal therapy…black women 9% less likely than white women to get mastectomy, breast-conserving surgery or other treatments, 10% less likely to get hormonal therapy and 13% less likely to get chemotherapy.”

This inexplicable racism isn’t just unfortunate, it’s deadly.  More research is needed to get to the exact bottom of this issue, but hopefully not too many more Latinas and African-American women will have to die of breast cancer before we figure out where, exactly, in the medical system this racial discrimination is occurring.