Are you a member of a racial or ethnic minority group?

The Komen Tissue Bank is dedicated to actively seeking the participation of women of diverse racial heritage.  It is vitally important that we work to make it understood why this is so.

If minority women do not take part in medical research or clinical trials, they will not benefit from the results. We need to know more about why the following statistics exist:

• African American women develop breast cancer at a younger age.  Breast cancers in black women are more likely to be Triple Negative, a type of breast cancer that is very aggressive, and difficult to treat.  According to the American Cancer Society (Oct. 2015) African American women now contract breast cancer at the same rate as Caucasian women, but they are much more likely to die from the disease.  In fact, African Americans die of breast cancer at a rate noticeably higher than all other groups (see graphs below).
• An estimated 14,000 cases of breast cancer were diagnosed in U.S. Hispanic women in 2009, with more than 2,200 deaths, making breast cancer the leading cause of cancer death among Latina women in the U.S.  Breast cancer in Latinas is more often diagnosed at a later stage (when the disease is more advanced) than when found in non-Hispanic women.
• Asian American women possess a false perception about their breast cancer risk rates. In fact, once Asians live in the U.S., their risk rates rise to equal those of Caucasian women (Ridley-Merriweather, 2016). Breast cancer is the most common cancer in Korean, Chinese, Filipino and Japanese women in the U.S.  Among Asian American and Pacific Islander women, Native Hawaiian and Japanese women have the highest rates of breast cancer. Native Hawaiian and Samoan women have the highest rates of breast cancer death in Asians, exceeding even those in white women (komen.org).

To study why these disparities exist, researchers need to have access to breast tissue from minority women. To find out exactly what it means for you to participate, please feel free to read and/or print our minority recruitment booklet in your choice of language below. This booklet is the result of research conducted by the KTB.

Minority Recruitment Booklets

In English

In Spanish

In Simplified Mandarin Chinese

In Traditional Mandarin Chinese

Graphs taken from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.