Breast cancer rises among Asian-American, Pacific Islander women, faster than many other groups
The reasons are unclear, say experts, but ‘one of the hypotheses we’re exploring is the role of stress’
Christina Kashiwada was travelling for work during the summer of 2018 when she noticed a small, itchy lump in her left breast.
She thought little of it at first. She did routine self-checks and kept up with medical appointments. But a relative urged her to get a mammogram. She took the advice and learned she had stage 3 breast cancer, a revelation that stunned her.
“I’m 36 years old, right?” said Kashiwada, a civil engineer in Sacramento, California. “No one’s thinking about cancer.”
About 11,000 Asian-American and Pacific Islander women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021 and about 1,500 died.
The latest federal data shows the rate of new breast cancer diagnoses in Asian-American and Pacific Islander women – a group that once had relatively low rates of diagnosis – is rising much faster than that of many other racial and ethnic groups. The trend is especially sharp among young women such as Kashiwada.
About 55 of every 100,000 Asian-American and Pacific Islander women under 50 were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021, surpassing the rate for Black and Hispanic women and on par with the rate for white women, according to age-adjusted data from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Hispanic people can be of any race or combination of races but are grouped separately in this data.
