(VitalNews.org) – Federal data suggests that the rate of new breast cancer diagnoses in both Asian Americans and Pacific Islander women is increasing rapidly and has surpassed that of other racial groups.
Christina Kashiwada was traveling for work when she found a lump on her breast that was itchy. She wasn’t as concerned with it but a relative pushed her to get a mammogram. This is when she found that she had stage three breast cancer. “I’m thirty-six years old, right? No one’s thinking about cancer.”
This scenario seems to become more and more common for women. According to records, about eleven thousand Pacific Islander and Asian American women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021 and fifteen hundred of those women died. The trend is actually increasing in younger women, such as Kashiwada.
Fifty-five of one hundred thousand Asian American and Pacific Islander women under fifty years old were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021. The rate of diagnoses within this group of women went up over fifty percent.
Says the director of the Clinical Breast Cancer Program at UC Davis Health, Helen Chew, “It’s a real trend.”
Chew continued, “It is just difficult to tease out exactly why it is. Is it because we’re seeing an influx of people who have less access to care? Is it because of many things culturally where they may not want to come in if they see something on their breast?”
There is urgency behind solving this because it’s costing lives. Many women of other ethnicities are seeing a decline in breast cancer while these groups of women are experiencing a sharp increase.
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