"Racial disparities in breast cancer diagnosis and survival rates may have more to do with neighborhood than race, according to a new University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign analysis. The study looked at patients ages 19 to 91 from breast cancer registries in six states, including Illinois. More than 93,600 black women living in big cities from 1980 to 2010 were included in the data set (approximately 14,000 from Chicagoland), which looked at neighborhood racial composition and segregation poverty rates and access to mammography.

The study found that residential segregation, defined as living in a neighborhood with a predominantly African-American population, significantly increased black women’s rates of late-stage diagnosis and doubled their odds of dying from breast cancer. White women living in predominantly African-American neighborhoods had comparable mortality rates."

Darcel Rockett | July 9, 2018

To read the full article, please click here. This piece appears in the Chicago Tribune.