Abstract

Much attention has been paid to the features of breast cancer in Africa and the parallels between breast cancer in indigenous Africans and in African American women, including a shift toward earlier onset; a tendency toward poorer outcomes; and an increased likelihood for the tumors to be negative for the estrogen receptor (ER), the progesterone receptor (PR), and/or the human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2) [1,2]. One of the more aggressive forms of breast cancer is termed ‘‘triple negative,’’ i.e., ER2, PR2, HER22 [3]. Patients with triple negative breast cancer tend to be younger than patients with other forms of the disease, and at all ages, the triple negative subtype is more common in women of African descent than in the white women in the United States [4–6].

Comments

This is the published PDF version of Mohammed, S.I., and Harford, J.B. (2014). Sorting Reality from What We Think We Know About Breast Cancer in Africa. PLoS:Medicine, 11(9). E1001721. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001721.

CC0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Keywords

breast cancer, Africa, cancer detection and diagnosis, systematic reviews, African Americans, Africans, medicine and health sciences, meta-analysis

Date of this Version

9-9-2014

DOI

10.1371/journal.pmed.1001721

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