The Komen Tissue Bank is dedicated to actively seeking the participation of individuals of diverse racial heritage. It is vitally important that we work to make it understood why this is so.
If people from minoritized populations do not take part in medical research or clinical trials, they will not benefit from the results. We need to know more about why the following statistics exist:
- Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States for Black women and Latinas.
- Black women develop breast cancer at a younger age and are more likely to die from the disease than women of any other racial or ethnic group. Black women are 20% more likely than any other racial group to be diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, a type of breast cancer that is very aggressive and difficult to treat.
- Breast cancer in Latinas is more often diagnosed at a later stage (when the disease is more advanced) than when found in non-Hispanic women.
- Asian women possess a false perception about their breast cancer risk rates. In fact, once Asians live in the U.S., their risk rates rise to equal those of white women. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in Korean, Chinese, Filipino and Japanese women in the U.S.
