In the cul-mination of research begun while he was an epide-miology stu-dent in GW’s SPHHS, the National Can-cer Institute’s Dr. Kenneth Hance has completed a study that shows that women with a relatively rare and aggressive form of breast cancer tend to be younger, have larger tumors and have a poorer survival rate compared with women with the most common forms of the disease.

Dr. Hance’s new study on so-called inflammatory breast carcinoma (IBC) was published in the July 6 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

IBC is a relatively uncommon and understudied type of breast cancer—characterized by redness, warmth and swelling—often without an underlying palpable mass. “This is one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer,” said Dr. Hance. “We felt it was time to take a closer look.”

“It just comes on so fast,” said Dr. Paul Levine, co-director of the GW Cancer Institute’s Office of Preven-tion and Control and research profes-sor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, who advised Dr. Hance.

Using the NCI’s large Surveil-lance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database, Dr. Hance and his colleagues studied more than 180,000 breast cancer cases diagnosed be-tween 1988 and 2000.

The study found that, while IBC makes up only about two percent of all breast cancer cases in the United States, women who do get the disease are diagnosed at an average age of about 59 years, three to seven years below the average age of diagnosis for other forms of breast cancer. In addi-tion, patients with IBC had a poorer survival rate, with a median survival of 2.9 years after diagnosis compared with 6.4 to 10 years for other types of breast cancer. Black patients with IBC had a poorer survival rate than White patients. On average, IBC tumors tended to be larger than those in other forms of breast cancer.

Other authors of the project in-cluded GW’s Heather A. Young, PhD, and NCI’s Willam F. Anderson, MD, and Susan S. Devesa, PhD.