African and African American women are more likely than women of other ancestries to develop and to die from triple-negative breast cancer. In the August 21, 2018 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a multinational research team identifies the genes responsible for inherited breast cancer in Nigerian women.
The Nigerian Breast Cancer Study, based in Ibadan, Southwest Nigeria, has been in the field for more than 20 years. During this period, breast cancer incidence throughout the country has steadily increased.
"This is the first study to use high-throughput genomic analysis of African women," said study author Olufunmilayo Olopade, MD, Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Human Genetics, director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics and associate dean for Global Health at the University of Chicago.
"Based on state-of-the-art genomic technologies, two things were clear," added co-author Mary-Claire King, Ph.D., American Cancer Society Professor of Medicine and Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. "Risks to Nigerian women who carry mutations in breast cancer genes are higher than risks to women in the U.S. with mutations in the same genes. And inherited breast cancer plays a bigger role in the total occurrence of breast cancer in Nigeria compared to the U.S."
The study enrolled 1,136 women with invasive breast cancer and 997 controls—women of similar ages and heritage who did not have breast cancer. Disease was far more advanced at diagnosis than in the U.S., with 86 percent of the patients who were fully evaluated diagnosed at either stage 3 or stage 4.
Almost half (46 percent) of the patients were diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer (tumors that lack estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors and human epidermal growth factor receptors). This is an aggressive breast cancer subtype, likely to have with a poor prognosis, even in wealthy countries.
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