Comments on: Black Women 40% More Likely to Die from Breast Cancer than White Women

By: 素晴らしいインフォグラフィクスは常にシンプルだが、決してシンプル過ぎない。 | InfoGraphToday

素晴らしいインフォグラフィクスは常にシンプルだが、決してシンプル過ぎない。 | InfoGraphToday — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 08:38:46 +0000

[…] thanks to Sociological Images, I discovered this interactive example made in December 2013 by NYTimes’ Hannah […]

By: Yrro Simyarin

Yrro Simyarin — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 13:32:00 +0000

Is the racial divide a useful one here, or is it just obscuring the correlation for income?

By: Agrajag

Agrajag — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 11:48:00 +0000

It’d be interesting to track what is the case: Is it that black women are more likely to GET breast-cancer, or is it that black women are more likely to DIE FROM breast cancer, or is it a little of both ?

Some risk-factors of breast-cancer are linked to poverty, so part of the gap could in principle be explainable as: black women are more likely to be poor than white women are.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 23:15:00 +0000

When it comes to mortality rates for largely geriatric illnesses, we can also look at the life-expectancy rate as a factor. The average life expectancy of black women has increased more precipitously for black women than white women since 1975, but to some extent this increases the odds that the cause of death for any given black woman will be cancer or heart disease rather than accidents, homicides, or pregnancy complications.

Also, like Bagelsan, I suspect (though it’s impossible to prove) that in 1975 breast cancer was less likely to have been identified in black women who actually had it. Considering that awareness of the disease has increased substantially over the years, and patients are likelier to be examined for it, it would follow that positive diagnoses would also increase.

By: jon

jon — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 08:41:00 +0000

Very interesting… Did they control for income level and obesity in their analysis /regressions? HRS would have this data or national health interview survey, I suspect.

Also a fixed effects model, if they had longitudinal data, could control for unobserved constant individual factors like childhood experiences or perception of racism (which could lower health over life course).

Its actually not that hard to tease out these factors, statistically speaking, with the right data and models. But research in medical journals, unfotunately, still tends to be very crude in terms of regression modelling.. They are great on some things, but regressions are sometimes not one of them

By: Bagelsan

Bagelsan — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 05:43:00 +0000

As a proof-of-concept I’m thinking of studies that show higher rates of environmentally-induced asthma in black children, for example. I don’t know about breast cancer specifically, but black people tend to face overall crappier living environments due to housing location, poverty, etc. There could well be a bump in pollution within the last few decades that would help account for the rise in breast cancer (assuming there was a rise.)

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 05:06:00 +0000

Which specific carcinogens that are linked to breast cancer are you referring to?

By: Bagelsan

Bagelsan — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 23:25:00 +0000

Obviously we need some fucking single-payer!

By: Bagelsan

Bagelsan — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 23:24:00 +0000

I also wonder if black women have always died of breast cancer at a higher rate than white women, but it’s only recently that those women have been correctly diagnosed (even postmortem), allowing them to be counted as cancer victims. Maybe the rate of deaths from “what the hell ever who knows” has likewise dropped more in black women than white women due to more dramatic increases in diagnosis of black women with things like cancer — the death toll from cancer obviously only measures the death toll from black women identified as having cancer, which may have started catching up with white women-with-identified-cancer a few decades ago.

By: Bagelsan

Bagelsan — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 23:18:00 +0000

I wouldn’t be surprised if black women were exposed to more carcinogens than white women, which exposure could well have increased in the last few decades.

By: Anna

Anna — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 18:16:00 +0000

“There has to be something else going on here, but what is it?!?”

I wonder how obesity factors into this. The highest rates of breast cancer occur in the age bracket where almost all women have gone through menopause. Obesity is a strong risk factor for post-menopausal breast cancer, and as a group, black women have the highest rates of obesity in the USA.

By: Geoff Smith

Geoff Smith — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 13:56:00 +0000

Maybe widening means something different to some people, but it looks like it’s been within .1-.2 of a 9 point difference for almost 15 years, and if you look at NY, NJ, CT, and MA things look close to parity, which is kind of impressive. It seems like a solved problem if the rest of the states would adopt the policies of those 4.

I’m actually more interested in the wide swings, and the fact that at the beginning of these timeframes black women appeared to do better. Is it because they were dying of something else (childbirth, perhaps?) or has something happened to increase the rate of breast cancer in general? Why did black women’s rate of death increase in the 80s and 90s? I could understand if they were suffering from discrimination that resulted in delay of incorporation of the new treatments, but how in the world would that have resulted in such a drastic INCREASE in morality if the only difference if white women have better access to technology than black women did in this period? Technology that didn’t even exist when black women did better in this arena.

This story is missing too much, and even the NYT is really lacking in detail. Black women now die more often of breast cancer than they did in 1975, and I find it hard to imagine that discrimination is worse now than it was then. There has to be something else going on here, but what is it?!? This doesn’t make any sense to me, there’s something else going on here. The idea that black women are doing worse than they used to because they don’t have access to advances that didn’t exist at the beginning of the study seems ludicrous to me..