摘要：Racial disparities in breast cancer mortality persist, and young Black women have higher disease incidence compared with White women. We compared trends in breast cancer mortality for young Black and White women with mortality trends for other common diseases from 1979 to 2010. In contrast to other cancers, ischemic heart disease, and stroke, the breast cancer mortality disparity has widened over the past 30 years, suggesting that unique aspects of disease biology, prevention, and treatment may explain persistent racial differences for young women. Black women have 40% higher breast cancer mortality rates compared with White women, despite a lower overall disease incidence. 1 The burden of breast cancer is particularly high among young Black women, who have higher breast cancer incidence and mortality rates than do young White women. 1,2 Racial differences in disease-specific mortality can arise from both unique aspects of a given disease and factors that affect outcomes more generally. For example, factors such as access to care, quality of care, discrimination, socioeconomic status, chronic stress, and comorbidity likely affect population-level mortality rates broadly. 3–5 An ecological approach comparing cause-specific mortality rates over time and across diseases may provide clues and generate hypotheses as to the determinants of racial disparities and ways to mitigate them. The purpose of this study was to compare trends in racial disparities in breast cancer mortality over the past few decades with trends in other common cancers and cardiovascular diseases. We focused on women younger than 50 years to explore to what extent patterns of racial disparities in breast cancer were similar to or different from those of other common diseases in young women.
