Study Finds Shifting Trend in Breast Cancer Risk in Asian American Women
Posted: Wednesday, March 27, 2019
The novel epidemiologic revelations of a breast cancer study published in Preventing Chronic Disease may raise more questions than they answer, giving researchers new lines of potential inquiry. Its basic finding was that in the fully adjusted model, two groups of San Francisco–area immigrant Asian American women—those who lived either less than 50%, or 50% or more, of their lives in the United States—were 2.5 to 3 times more likely, respectively, to develop breast cancer than U.S.-born Asian American women.
Conversely, previous research “has consistently found that for racial/ethnic minority populations such as Asian Americans, those not born in the United States have lower rates of female breast cancer than their U.S.-born counterparts,” wrote Brittany N. Morey, PhD, MPH, of the University of California–Riverside’s School of Public Policy, and colleagues.
Among the less-surprising findings were that women with breast cancer were more likely to have a family history of the disease and to have never been pregnant. However, socioeconomic status may be in play, too: It has recently increased markedly in the Bay Area’s community of naturalized Asian Americans, and higher income and education have been previously found to be associated with greater breast cancer risk, noted the authors. Also, since earlier work showed that the Bay Area’s immigrant Asian American women were much more likely than U.S.-born Asian American women to have had a mammogram in the previous 2 years (63.2% vs. 37.9%), “our findings may be in part due to higher rates of detection among immigrant women.”
The work utilized a breast cancer case-control data set of Bay Area Asian American women that included 132 with breast cancer and 438 without diagnosed breast cancer matched to cases by age and country of origin. The results of future investigations inspired by the “yet-unidentified risk factors” evoked by this study could “lead to better breast cancer prevention activities, especially among immigrant groups living in the United States,” concluded Dr. Morey and her team.
Disclosure: The study authors’ disclosure information may be found at cdc.gov.
