Black and Asian women are more likely than white women to experience significant delays in getting breast biopsies after a mammogram identifies an abnormality. Moreover, those delays appear to be influenced by screening site-specific factors that may stem from structural racism, according to research published today in JAMA Oncology.
“Even after adjusting for multiple factors thought to contribute to delayed diagnosis, we still see persistent disparities among minority women, particularly Black women. To me, this suggests that other underlying factors are contributing to these differences in time to biopsy,” said Dr. Marissa Lawson, the study’s lead author. She is an acting instructor of radiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
The study reviewed the cases of 45,186 women whose screening mammograms had shown a tissue abnormality that called for a biopsy to ascertain whether it was cancerous. Across the study population, 34.6% of women were not biopsied within 30 days, 16% were not biopsied at 60 days, and 12% were not biopsied within 90 days.
The delays are concerning because previous studies have indicated that the benefit of screening diminishes with time, and these lags are associated with later-stage disease at time of diagnosis.
Using the time-to-biopsy of white patients as the benchmark, the researchers found that:
- At 30 days out, Asian women had a 66% higher risk of not undergoing a biopsy, Black women, 52% higher, and Hispanic women, 50% higher.
- At 90 days out, Black women had a 28% higher risk of not undergoing a biopsy. Among Asian women and Hispanic women, the risk was 21% higher and 12 % higher, respectively.
With that unadjusted model, the researchers then examined whether specific factors of individual patients, their neighborhoods and their screening facilities influenced the time to biopsy among women of different races and ethnicities.
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