Does Benign Breast Disease Also Raise Cancer Risk in African-American Women?

A new study shows characteristics of benign breast disease are associated with potential cancer risk in African-American women

Benign breast disease (BBD) is an established risk factor for breast cancer among Caucasian women, according to Michele Cote, PhD, associate professor of oncology in the Wayne State University School of Medicine and the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute. However, for African-American women, who tend to get breast cancer earlier, in more aggressive forms, and die more frequently of it, less is known about BBD.

To see if characteristics found in a group of Caucasian women studied recently by the Mayo Clinic increase or decrease risk in the same ways in black women, Cote and colleagues reviewed data from about 1400 20- to 84-year-old African-American women who underwent breast biopsies between 1997 and 2000. The researchers identified biopsies that revealed BBD and also traced subsequent breast cancers.

Study results, published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, showed that 68% of women studied showed nonproliferative BBD, while 29% had the proliferative form of the disease without atypia.

Proliferative BBD with atypia was evident in the remaining 3% of the women studied, a percentage similar to a group of Caucasian women studied recently by the Mayo Clinic. In Cote’s study, women with proliferative BBD with atypia were 3 times more likely to develop breast cancer compared with women without proliferative disease.

A number of pathological characteristics are also associated with BBD and breast cancer. Included among the characteristics studied by Cote and colleagues was columnar alteration, a pathological characteristic shown to be associated with increased breast cancer risk. According to Cote, because columnar alterations are highly correlated with proliferative disease, further study of the independent effects of both could be valuable.

“Better characterization of the risk of breast cancer among women with BBD, considering both ethnicity and detailed molecular findings, can lead to better surveillance, earlier diagnosis and, potentially, improved survival,” Cote said.

Source: Wayne State University.