Re: Black–White breast cancer incidence trends: effects of ethnicity

CE DeSantis, A Jemal - JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer …, 2019 - academic.oup.com
JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2019academic.oup.com
We read with interest the report by Davis Lynn et al.(1) that breast cancer incidence rates in
non-Hispanic white (NHW) and non-Hispanic black (NHB) women did not recently converge.
This differs from our previous analysis of long-term breast cancer trends based on data from
the nine oldest Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registries that found
rates converged between black women and white women in 2012 (2). Indeed, we agree with
the authors that it is important to consider ethnicity when examining race-specific trends; …
We read with interest the report by Davis Lynn et al.(1) that breast cancer incidence rates in non-Hispanic white (NHW) and non-Hispanic black (NHB) women did not recently converge. This differs from our previous analysis of long-term breast cancer trends based on data from the nine oldest Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registries that found rates converged between black women and white women in 2012 (2). Indeed, we agree with the authors that it is important to consider ethnicity when examining race-specific trends; however; this information was not available in the SEER 9 database. Thus, we extended our previous analysis using data on female breast cancer cases for all ages combined from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR), which includes information from 43 states with high-quality data during 2002 to 2014, representing 92% of the US population (3). We adjusted the data for reporting delays using race-specific delay ratios from the 18 SEER registries, because delay factors are not publicly available for the combined NAACCR catchment area.
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