UA News

The study showed that nearly half of those who noticed a change in their breast waited a month or more to seek medical attention, citing access to insurance or affordability in their delay.

Researchers at The University of Arizona are just beginning to understand breast cancer risk in Hispanic women, and they continue to gather data for analysis through a binational study.

Data from the ELLA Binational Breast Cancer Study was presented last week at the American Association for Cancer Research Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Carefree, Ariz., and attended by more than 500 people from around the world. Elena Martínez, professor of epidemiology at the UA's Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Arizona Cancer Center, was a conference co-chair.

UA graduate student Rachel Zenuk said her assessment of data from 317 Hispanic study participants from Arizona and Texas shows that 68 percent of breast cancer was found through self-detection, followed by 22 percent found by screening mammography.

Among Hispanic women born in the United States, mammography use was at 83 percent, compared with 62 percent among study participants not born in the U.S.

Zenuk said nearly half of those who noticed a change in their breasts waited a month or more to seek medical attention. The most common reason was that these women did not have access to insurance or could not afford medical care.

Betsy Wertheim, an assistant scientific investigator in the Arizona Cancer Center Cancer Prevention and Control Program, found that having a family history of breast cancer increased the risk of aggressive triple hormone receptor negative breast cancer in Hispanic women, but not in African-American women. The Arizona participants in the ELLA study had a five times greater association between family history of breast cancer and triple-negative breast cancer, compared with the Texans in the study who had no significant association between family history and the risk of disease.

Wertheim said researchers are trying to determine if the difference in association in Arizona and Texas participants was due to environmental exposures or different ancestry of the women from the two geographic locations.

"Breast cancer is a large and growing problem" among Hispanic women, Martínez said. "This work sets the stage for subsequent work."