'If I lived on the North Side': Neighborhood may matter more than race in breast cancer survival rates

CHICAGO - In 2008, South Shore resident Cheryl King found a lump in her right breast.

When she told a health professional at a South Side facility, he dismissed it, saying many African-Americans have lumps in their breasts. In the three months it took to get appointments and tests with other professionals to verify it was cancer, it had grown into a stage 2 tumor.

King, 59, is not alone. Racial disparities in breast cancer diagnosis and survival rates may have more to do with neighborhood than race, according to a new University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign analysis.

The study looked at patients ages 19 to 91 from breast cancer registries in six states, including Illinois. More than 93,600 black women living in big cities from 1980 to 2010 were included in the data set (approximately 14,000 from Chicagoland), which looked at neighborhood