Cancer News, Treatment and Research

African American women with early stage, invasive breast cancer were 12 percent less likely than Caucasian women with the same diagnosis to receive a minimally invasive technique, axillary sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy, years after the procedure had become the standard of surgical practice, according to research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The study, presented at the 2012 CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, also found that those African American women who underwent the older, more invasive procedure, axillary lymph node (ALN) dissection, had higher rates of lymphedema.