Asian American and Pacific Islander women once had relatively low rates of breast cancer, but the demographic is now seeing faster-rising rates of cancer compared to other races — and experts are not sure why, CBS News reported Sep. 3.
The breast cancer death rate among all women dropped 30% between 2000 to 2023, but the death rate for Asian American and Pacific Islander women of any age was the same in 2023 as in 2000, at about 12 in every 100,000 women of these races. Breast cancer is more common among young AAPI women, but there have been significant rises in cases for women diagnosed with pancreatic, thyroid, colon, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and endometrial cancer.
"We're seeing somewhere almost around a 4% per-year increase," Scarlett Gomez, PhD, a professor and epidemiologist at the San Francisco-based UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, told CBS. "We're seeing even more than the 4% per-year increase in Asian/Pacific Islander women less than age 50."
In 2021, about 55 of every 100,000 Asian American and Pacific Islander women under 50 were diagnosed with breast cancer, higher than the rate for Black and Hispanic women and on par with rates for white women, according to National Institute of Health data.
The rate of breast cancer cases for these racial groups for women under 50 rose 52% from 2000 through 2021. The rates for women 50 to 64 grew 33%, and the rate for women 65 and older grew 43% in the same period. This is compared to the rate for women of all ages, races and ethnicities, which grew by 3% in the same period.
"It's a real trend," Helen Chew, MD, director of the Clinical Breast Cancer Program at Sacramento, Calif.-based UC Davis Health, told CBS. "It is just difficult to tease out exactly why it is. Is it because we're seeing an influx of people who have less access to care? Is it because of many things culturally where they may not want to come in if they see something on their breast?"