Black women twice as likely to die from cervical cancer

Submitted by American Renaissance

Provocative new research might help explain why Black women are so much more likely than whites to develop and die from cervical cancer: They seem to have more trouble clearing HPV, the virus that causes the disease.

Doctors have long thought that less access to screening and follow-up health care were the reasons Black women are 40 percent more likely to develop cervical cancer and twice as likely to die from it. The new study involving young college women suggests there might be a biological explanation for the racial disparity, too.

If further study confirms this novel finding, it would make the HPV vaccine even more important for Black women, said Worta McCaskill-Stevens, a prevention specialist at the National Cancer Institute. The vaccine is recommended for all girls starting at age 11.

Researchers at the University of South Carolina in Columbia studied 326 white and 113 Black students taking part in a wider federal health study. All were given Pap tests—lab exams of cells scraped from the cervix—and HPV tests every six months throughout their years in school.

Although the groups were similar in how many new HPV infections were detected and risk factors such as how many sex partners they had, doctors saw striking differences in how long their infections lasted.

At any checkup, Blacks were 1.5 times more likely to test positive for infection with one of the HPV strains that raise cancer risk, said study leader Kim Creek.

“The African-American women weren’t clearing the virus as fast. They were actually holding onto it about six months longer,” for 18 months versus 12 months for whites, he said.

Ten percent of Blacks had abnormal Pap tests versus 6 percent of whites.

Two years after initial infections were found, 56 percent of Black women were still infected but only 24 percent of whites remained infected.

The results are “provocative” and need validation in a study that looks beyond this one region, said McCaskill-Stevens of the cancer institute.

“We have known there are genetic differences between the races,” and it’s possible that a gene from certain ancestries such as African might play a role in the ability to clear an HPV infection, she said.