Invasive breast cancer rate increasing
Premenopausal women appear to be developing invasive breast cancer at a greater rate than previous generations did, according to a presentation at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting in Boston last week.

Young African-American women are having higher invasive breast cancer rates than white women. Compared with women of their grandmothers' generation, black women had a 41 percent greater rate of invasive breast cancer and white women had a 21 percent greater rate, researchers reported. Although rates of invasive breast cancer are on the decline overall, African-American women, have not shared in this trend.

The investigators speculated that "the use of estrogen and other hormone-containing personal care products in young African American women accounts, in part, for their increased risk of breast cancer prior to menopause, by subjecting breast buds to elevated estrogen exposure during critical windows of vulnerability in utero and in early life."
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