A new study has found that Hispanic women are 20 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than non-Hispanic women.
Hispanic women seem to get a less treatable form of the disease, say researchers.
“This difference may be associated with a tumor phenotype that is less responsive to chemotherapy,” said Kathy Baumgartner, of the School of Public Health and Information Sciences at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. “Increased awareness of this ethnic disparity is needed to improve survival in Hispanic women with breast cancer.”

The study’s researchers analyzed 692 Hispanic and non-Hispanic white women in New Mexico between 1992 and 1996. They chronicled the 577 women who had invasive breast cancer through 2008.

“It is not clear how much of this ethnic difference in survival is due to socioeconomic factors influencing access to screening and treatment, or to biological ones,” Baumgartner said. “Some studies suggest that Hispanic women are more likely to develop ER-negative tumors [tumors not driven by estrogen] that are resistant to chemotherapy.”

The research recently was presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.