Knowledge about breast cancer isn't protection

Guest Editorial

What most women know about breast cancer is not enough to protect them from a growing silent killer.

The common wisdom is: Have regular mammograms; conduct self-examinations for lumps.

While that information is good advice for most forms of breast cancer, it does little to detect inflammatory breast cancer , a rare, but lethal disease, more common among African American women than white women.

With IBC, only 40 percent of patients survive more than five years, according to scientific experts, such as Dr. Massimo Critofanilli, a director at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer center in Houston.

A major problem is that IBC is often misdiagnosed. While the medical establishment has been trained to look for lumps, IBC appears in sheets of cancer, or what doctors call cancer nests.

As part of October's Cancer Awareness Month, clinics and hospitals are sending "mammovans" into under-served neighborhoods. In my own research among those involved in this cancer prevention programs, I found none who had heard of IBC.

Typical symptoms include: swelling, sometimes a cup size in a few days; darkened color; ridges and thickened areas of the skin; a bruise that doesn't disappear; nipple retraction or discharge, breast warm to the touch or aching or stabbing breast pain.

Personal statements on the IBC Research Foundation Web site attest to how off-base diagnoses can be. Doctors confused IBC symptoms with spider bites. Patients were told their discomfort came from wearing wire bras, that "the good news is that cancer doesn't hurt," and patients were wrongly informed they were too young to have cancer.

Misdiagnoses can often prove tragic. Personal testimonies on the website tell heartbreaking stories about how when some doctors had finally performed biopsies and found the disease, it was in Stage 4. There is no stage five.

What bothers me are the news reports that give the impression that IBC is insignificant because it only represents 2-5 percent of breast cancers in the United States. That may be true but according to the IBC Foundation the rate among African Americans who have this form of cancer is as high as 10 percent.

Ten percent, with such a low survival rate, is significant and much more should be done by cancer organizations to get the word out to the medical profession, as well as potential patients.

Far too often, threats or high risks to the health of African Americans are buried in the fine print. For example, the rate of AIDS diagnoses for Black women is 23 times that of white women. And HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black women aged 25-34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The American Cancer Society estimated more than 19,000 Black women would be diagnosed with breast cancer this year - the second-most common cancer among Black women, surpassed only by lung cancer. And while the incidence of ordinary breast cancer is about 12 percent lower in Black women than in white women, with Black women, it often strikes at an earlier age, and the mortality rate is higher.

Early detection is still the best medicine. Regular mammograms and self-exams are still lifesavers in most situations. Something more, however, has to be done about IBC. The wall of ignorance and silence must come down.

[Author Affiliation]

Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds is an author, an adjunct professor at the Howard University School of Divinity and the religion columnist for the National Newspaper Publishing Association.