By: Diana Barnes-Brown for Fibroids1New findings have indicated that when it comes to fighting endometrial cancer, African-American women may have more difficulty beating the disease than their Caucasian counterparts. Previously, doctors and researchers had been troubled by lower survival rates in African American women with the disease, but had difficulty determining why. These recent findings shed light on potential causes for the inequality, suggesting that the difference may be due to subtle differences in gene expression.
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According to statistics from The American Cancer Society:- This year in the United States, roughly 40,880 women will be diagnosed with endometrial cancer and 7,310 will die of the disease.
- Endometrial cancer is the most common reproductive cancer in women
- If diagnosed early on, the five-year survival rate for endometrial cancer is 96 percent.
- Risk factors for endometrial cancer include early first menstruation (starting periods before 12 years old), late menopause (going through menopause after 50), a history of infertility, obesity, a diet high in animal fat, diabetes, prior radiation exposure and certain other breast or reproductive cancers.
- To learn more about endometrial and other cancers, visit The American Cancer Society.
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According to a recent press release from the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists, researchers from the National Cancer Institute and Walter Reed Army Medical Center, led by Lieutenant Colonel G. Larry Maxwell, MD, have discovered that tumors in African-American women with advanced endometrial cancer are more aggressive than tumors in Caucasian women suffering from the same illness.
The researchers made their discovery after conducting two studies on endometrial cancer. In the first study, the researchers examined data from four similar treatment trials conducted by the Gynecologic Oncology Group (GOG), a cooperative group responsible for organizing a majority of the large-scale therapeutic gynecologic cancer studies in the United States.
The researchers looked at survival rates for 997 Caucasian women and 168 African American women with late-stage endometrial cancer, and found that the African American women were 25 percent more likely to die of their illness than the Caucasian women. Since the trials were conducted in a clinically-controlled setting, where all patients received similar care, the researchers determined that the differences in survival rates were likely due to biological factors.
Hypothesizing that gene expression affecting tumor growth might be at the heart of the racial disparity in survival rates, the researchers conducted a second study. In the second study, they examined global gene expression in patients with late-stage endometrial cancer with the help of tumor samples from patients who received treatment at Duke University Medical Center.
The researchers compared cancers from 18 African-American women with those from 27 Caucasian women, matched by cancer stage, grade and cell type. They found that African-American and Caucasian women had differing patterns of gene expression, and concluded that these differences may be partially to blame for the unequal survival rates in the two groups.
“Both of these studies on racial disparities between African-American and Caucasian women with endometrial cancer suggest that a biologic reason may in part underlie the ‘aggressive’ endometrial cancers that develop in some African-American patients,” noted Maxwell, but “further research is needed to determine how these differences can be studied to help identify better therapies for high-risk minority groups.”
