Breast cancer rises among Asian-American, Pacific Islander women, faster than many other groups

Christina Kashiwada was travelling for work during the summer of 2018 when she noticed a small, itchy lump in her left breast.

She thought little of it at first. She did routine self-checks and kept up with medical appointments. But a relative urged her to get a mammogram. She took the advice and learned she had stage 3 breast cancer, a revelation that stunned her.

“I’m 36 years old, right?” said Kashiwada, a civil engineer in Sacramento, California. “No one’s thinking about cancer.”

About 11,000 Asian-American and Pacific Islander women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021 and about 1,500 died.

The latest federal data shows the rate of new breast cancer diagnoses in Asian-American and Pacific Islander women – a group that once had relatively low rates of diagnosis – is rising much faster than that of many other racial and ethnic groups. The trend is especially sharp among young women such as Kashiwada.