Crisis and Management

Older women, especially those over 75, are more likely to die of breast cancer than younger women, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The older women were 63 per cent more likely to die of it than women under 65, said researchers, who tracked thousands of women.

“I suspect it’s undertreatment. We did show the rates of chemotherapy and radiation therapy are less in the older group,” said Stephen Jones, medical director at US Oncology Research in Texas and one of the study’s authors.

The study focused on nearly 10,000 women who had already gone through menopause and who had been diagnosed with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.

That’s the most common type of the disease and is considered less dangerous than the hormone receptive-negative types because it is often slower growing and might respond to hormone treatments.

In the study, researchers found that five out of every 100 women diagnosed under age 65 and six out of every 100 women diagnosed between 65 and 74 years-old died from breast cancer within five years.

“What’s different in older women is they tend to get lesser and poorer treatment,” said Hyman Muss of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who was not involved with the study.

“We need to teach doctors not to think of a person’s chronological age, but think of their functional age,” Muss added.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 at 6:37 am and is filed under Aging, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.