Clinical Characteristics of Breast Cancers in African-American Women with Benign Breast Disease: A Comparison to the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program.

BREAST tumor risk factors; BREAST cancer prognosis; ACADEMIC medical centers; BLACK people; BREAST tumors; CANCER patient medical care; CANCER invasiveness; CELL receptors; CHI-squared test; COMPARATIVE studies; REPORTING of diseases; EPIDEMIOLOGICAL research; FISHER exact test; MARITAL status; EVALUATION of medical care; METROPOLITAN areas; PROBABILITY theory; PUBLIC health surveillance; REGRESSION analysis; RESEARCH funding; RISK assessment; SELF-evaluation; STATISTICS; SURVIVAL analysis (Biometry); T-test (Statistics); WHITE people; WOMEN'S health; DATA analysis; DESCRIPTIVE statistics; KAPLAN-Meier estimator; GENETICS

Benign breast disease ( BBD) is a very common condition, diagnosed in approximately half of all American women throughout their lifecourse. White women with BBD are known to be at substantially increased risk of subsequent breast cancer; however, nothing is known about breast cancer characteristics that develop after a BBD diagnosis in African- American women. Here, we compared 109 breast cancers that developed in a population of African- American women with a history of BBD to 10,601 breast cancers that developed in a general population of African- American women whose cancers were recorded by the Metropolitan Detroit Cancer Surveillance System ( MDCSS population). Demographic and clinical characteristics of the BBD population were compared to the MDCSS population, using chi-squared tests, Fisher's exact tests, t-tests, and Wilcoxon tests where appropriate. Kaplan- Meier curves and Cox regression models were used to examine survival. Women in the BBD population were diagnosed with lower grade (p = 0.02), earlier stage cancers (p = 0.003) that were more likely to be hormone receptor-positive (p = 0.03) compared to the general metropolitan Detroit African- American population. In situ cancers were more common among women in the BBD cohort (36.7%) compared to the MDCSS population (22.1%, p < 0.001). Overall, women in the BBD population were less likely to die from breast cancer after 10 years of follow-up (p = 0.05), but this association was not seen when analyses were limited to invasive breast cancers. These results suggest that breast cancers occurring after a BBD diagnosis may have more favorable clinical parameters, but the majority of cancers are still invasive, with survival rates similar to the general African- American population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]