• 10/24/2006
  • Marietta, GA
  • Will Boggs, MD
  • CancerPage.com

Blacks under 20 years face higher rates of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) than do whites and even Asians, according to a report in the October Archives of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery.

“NPC in the U.S. is not a disease affecting only Asians,” Luke M. Richey from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, North Carolina told Reuters Health. “NPC is a relatively rare neoplasm, and in younger age groups, it occurs in blacks at a rate more than twice that of whites.”

Richey and colleagues used data from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) tumor registry to investigate incidence and survival rates for cases of NPC in blacks, whites, and Asians younger than 30 years between 1973 and 2002.

Among individuals under age 20 years, NPC incidence rates ranged from 1.61 per million for blacks to 0.95 per million for Asians and 0.61 per million for whites, the authors report.

In the age 20 to 29 group, incidence rates were much higher for Asians (7.18/million) than for blacks (1.87/million) and whites (0.96/million), the results indicate.

Survival rates in younger patients diagnosed with NPC did not differ significantly among blacks, whites, and Asians, the report indicates.

“The higher incidence of NPC in young blacks in the U.S. has multiple causes,” Richey said. “Genetic and/or environmental factors lead to cellular or immune alterations, which in the setting of EBV viral infection, give rise to NPC.”

“As we accumulate longer follow-up in national and regional cancer databases, we will be able to further investigate NPC epidemiology and make comparisons between demographic groups,” Richey concluded.

Source:
Arch Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg 2006;132:1035-1040.