After years of declines, breast cancer death rates have stopped going down in women older than 74, researchers said Thursday.
The disease resulted in the deaths of more than 42,000 women last year. It is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women in the U.S.
“The fact that breast cancer mortality rates have stopped declining for women over age 74 is an alarming new trend,” Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center's Debra Monticciolo said in a statement. “This is in addition to women under age 40 no longer seeing mortality rates decline from breast cancer. These groups are exactly those discouraged from breast cancer screening by some U.S. guidelines.”
Monticciolo was an author of the research shared Thursday in the Journal of Breast Imaging.
The reason death rates - which have been dropping since 1990 - are no longer declining is tied to an increase in advanced-stage breast cancer when women are diagnosed with the disease.
Screening for breast cancer, which can help find tumors when it is easier to treat, is only recommended for women under the age of 40 who are at higher-than-average risk, and some guidelines discourage women over 74 from screening.
The paper also confirmed previous research which indicated that breast cancer death rates have stopped falling in women younger than 40 years old.
“The researchers here found that in both younger and older groups, the end of mortality rate decline was primarily due to mortality rates no longer declining for white women under 40 and over 74, as well as unfavorable trends for Hispanic women ages 20 to 39 years and for Asian, Hispanic, and Native American women 75 and older. Breast cancer mortality rates in Black women continued to decline in all age groups,” Oxford University Press, which published the paper, said in a release.
To reach these conclusions, they assessed death rates that have been collected by the National Center for Health Statistics since 1990.
For U.S. women overall, breast cancer death rates have fallen markedly from 1990 to 2022, plummeting by 43.5 percent over that period. The years between 2010 and 2022 saw the lowest rate of decrease recorded since 1990. From 1993 to 2013, the death rate decreased by 1.26 percent each year for women who were 75 years old and older.
Death rates have fallen for Asian, Hispanic, and Native American women. Rates in Black women continued to decline in all age groups.
However, the authors noted that Black women are especially in need of alternatives to current breast cancer risk assessment.
Black women in the U.S. have around a 40 percent higher death rate from breast cancer than white women, according to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
Those under 50 are twice as likely to die from breast cancer as white women, the researchers said.
"Anyone can get cancer, right? But the people who are dying are specifically those that happen to be Black individuals," Dr. Paris Thomas, executive director of Chicago-based breast cancer education organization Equal Hope, told FOX 32 on Thursday. "So it does discriminate."
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