Black women are 38 percent more likely to die of breast cancer than white women, and slightly less likely to develop it in the first place. That gap does not sit in who gets sick. It sits in when it gets found.
The figures come from the American Cancer Society’s 2025 report for Black Americans. Dr. Felecia Sumner, a board-certified family medicine physician who specializes in integrative, functional and holistic medicine, put it in three words. “Prevention is cure.”
The screenings run on a schedule that has nothing to do with how anybody feels. Lipid panels. Blood pressure and blood sugar. Cancer screening. Hepatitis C testing, which Dr. Jen Caudle, a family physician and associate professor at Rowan University, said people routinely do not know about. “A lot of people don’t know that.” Vaccines. Bone density and lung screening for some groups.
About 58 percent of Black adults have high blood pressure, the highest rate of any racial or ethnic group in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A KFF analysis found Black adults are actually more likely than white adults to report a routine checkup. Nearly 20 per cent still went a full year without one.
A well visit and a problem visit are not the same appointment. One is for when something is wrong. The other is for the years when nothing is, which a 2024 Stanford Medicine study puts at the mid-forties and again the mid-sixties.
