Despite equal access to health care services, differences persist in the size, stage, and grade of breast cancer for Hispanic women compared with non-Hispanic white women, according to results from a study published online April 9 in Cancer.

The study compared 139 Hispanic women and 2,118 NHW women with breast cancer who were all established members of the Kaiser Permanente Colorado health plan. The Hispanic women were diagnosed at a younger age; at a later stage of disease; with larger, higher grade tumors; and with less treatable estrogen- and progesterone-negative tumors, reported the investigators led by Dr. A. Tyler Watlington at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

"The results of this study confirm those of many previous studies that breast cancer presents differently in Hispanic women," the researchers noted. Previous research has suggested that the differences may be due to socioeconomic factors, especially lack of or inadequate health insurance and less access to care among low-income Hispanic women. However, the current study shows that "these differences were apparent even among a group of Hispanic women with equal access to care and similar health care utilization," they added.

"The results of this study, in our opinion, lend further support to the evidence for a biologic/genetic basis for these differences," the researchers stated. Future research should more carefully explore differences in clinical presentation as well as biologic differences in tumor genotypes and phenotypes, "as different strategies for breast cancer prevention may then be warranted for Hispanic women," they concluded.

HPV Vaccines Demonstrate Long-Term Protection
New data presented at the AACR annual meeting today on the longer term effectiveness of two human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines demonstrate strong protection against the two HPV types linked to more than 70 percent of cervical cancers as well as the precancerous lesions associated with them.

Data from the ongoing evaluation of participants in a phase II trial testing a still-experimental vaccine manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) called Cervarix showed that more than 98 percent of the 776 participants for whom extended follow-up data are available maintained protection against HPV types 16 and 18 - considered the two most oncogenic HPV types - for more than 5 years.

The vaccine, reported the study's lead investigator, Dr. Stanley Gall from the University of Louisville, provided near complete protection against HPV types 16 and 18 incident infection (98 percent), 100-percent protection against 6- and 12-month persistent infection, and protection against most instances of HPV-associated precancerous growths. Although it's only designed to protect against HPV types 16 and 18, the GSK vaccine also demonstrated protection against incident infections of HPV type 45 (88 percent) and HPV type 31 (54 percent), which together account for approximately 10 percent of cervical cancers, Dr. Gall explained.