Volume 1, Number 4
February 17, 1999
Published by RPHP
PO Box 60 Unionville, NY 10988
Editor: W.L. McDonnell
https://radiation.org

THE CURRENT CANCER EPIDEMIC AND THE BABY BOOM GENERATION (continuted)

By Jay M. Gould, Director
Radiation and Public Health Project

BLACK FEMALE BREAST CANCER MORTALITY 1950-2020
According to Figure 10, Black female breast cancer deaths have been rising extremely rapidly since 1950. Unlike white females over 35, there has been very little decline since 1990, neither for the number of deaths nor for the mortality rate.

Figure 10

In Figure 10 the rate displays the same upward surge in the 1980s that we have associated with the Chernobyl insult, but Black women do not show any improvement in the period after 1990 when for White women the effects of Chernobyl appeared to be dissipating. This suggests that the immune response is inferior in Black women as compared to Whites, undoubtedly because of poverty and poorer nutrition.

This shows up especially in Figure 11, which shows how much higher were the post-1985 observed numbers of deaths than the numbers projected if the age-specific mortality rates of each age group remained at the pre-Chernobyl level of 1985.

Figure 11

Figure 12 compares the observed overall annual mortality rates for all Black women over 35 in recent years over what these rates would have been had the 1985 age-specific rate remained unchanged from the pre-Chernobyl level of 1985. Clearly the post-1985 insult to the immune response of Black women was so great that even by 1996, the observed rate was about 68 deaths per 100,000 women as against a projected level of 63 deaths, had the 1985 rates been maintained.

Figure 12

Figure 12 also shows that with a constant set of age-specific rates, there would have been for Black women as for White women, a steady decline since 1980 in the overall mortality rates over age 35. Again as with White women, a rapid increase of Black female baby boomers who reached the age of 35 in 1980, meant that those dying of breast cancer with relatively lower age-specific mortality rates than older women--would lower the overall rate.

Figure 13 reveals how much more rapid was the rise in the number of younger Black women aged 35 to 54 in this period than the increase in older women. By 1996, younger women made up more than half of the women old enough to die prematurely of breast cancer.

Figure 13

Figure 14 records a steady annual increase in the number of breast cancer deaths among younger Black women since 1980, far greater than for White women as shown in Figure 6. This explains why, with increasing numbers of deaths of younger women, the overall mortality rate of all women over 35 should tend to fall.

Figure 14

Figure 15 offers a projection, provided by the Census Bureau, of the expected age composition of Black women over 35 for the years 1990 to 2020. This shows clearly that the 1980s and the 1990s were the years in which the steady increase of baby boomers swelled the ranks of younger women aged 35 to 54, but that in the first two decades of the 21 century, baby boomers will accelerate the increase in the number of older women over the age of 55.

Figure 15

In this later period there will no longer be a decline in the overall mortality rate due to the increasing importance of young women under 55. In fact Figure 15 shows that there will be no increase in the number of Black younger women aged 35 to 54 in the first two decades of the 21st century.

For both White and Black women we can expect that in the first two decades of the 21st century baby boomers will constitute the bulk of older women over the age of 55, the peak years of breast cancer mortality, and that on this score alone there will be a rapid increase in the number of women dying of breast cancer.

As we did in the case of White women, we shall now project the number of future Black female breast cancer deaths based on holding constant the 1995 age-specific rates for each age group. See figure 16. With this assumption of unchanging future mortality rates, Black female breast cancer deaths among women over 35--which numbered 1225 in 1950--would increase seven-fold to 8576 by 2020. This is twice the increase we found for White women in Figure 8.

Figure 16

This illustrates that a relatively greater impairment of the immune response of Black women is equivalent to accelerating the process of aging. By the year 2020, the risk of dying of breast cancer for Black women will be twice that of white women.

In Figure 9 we indicated that purely because of the increasing weight given to deaths of baby boomer women, there will be an increase in the overall mortality rate for all women over 35 by the year 2020. For Black women, the overall mortality rate implied by the deaths projected in Figure 18 will rise from a low of 68 deaths per 100,000 in 1999 to 76 by 2020. This is a far steeper rise than the corresponding increase shown for Whites in Figure 9.

This suggests a way to make allowance for the assumption underlying Figure 16, that there will be no increase in mortality rates for each age group after 1995. If damage sustained by the immune response will accelerate the process of aging, the we must assume that the deaths projected for the year 2020 will be reached far sooner than that year for both Black and White women.

This is illustrated in Figs. 17 and 18, which assumes that with increased mortality rates after 2000, the deaths projected for 2020 may be reached as early as 2010. If not 2010, in any case in some year prior to 2020, we can affirm that 60,000 Black and White women will die of breast cancer as against 40,000 in 1990, an increase of 50 percent since 1990 and a three-fold increase over 18000 deaths in 1950.

Figure 17

Figure 18

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