But there has been no scientific analysis of the reasons. Some women are being confronted with joining a study at a time when they are also being forced to make decisions about their lives. It's not an easy thing to do. Approximately 180,000 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed in 1997, and about 44,000 women are expected to die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society . As October's National Breast Cancer Awareness Month begins, the staff at the UCSF Breast Care Center is urging women with the disease to help find a cure by joining a clinical trial.
Women of color have an even lower representation among such studies.
This compares to children's cancer, which has a 45-50 percent enrollment in clinical trials, and is a major reason for a substantial increase in survival rates over the years, according to UCSF and NCI children's cancer experts. According to Brown, clinical trials have a bad connotation for some women, who believe they may be used as guinea pigs. Women from different ethnic groups also have their own barriers to participating, from language to cultural views about cancer. Tripathy said that women are more likely to enroll in clinical studies if their cancer is in an advanced stage that has spread to other organs, since conventional treatment is rarely curative. Even though new drugs are often first tested in women with advanced breast cancer, most women in this country are diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer.