Native Hawaiian women have the highest breast cancer incidence rate among Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women (AANHPI) in the United States, according to a new American Cancer Society report.
Native Hawaiians have a breast cancer incidence rate 27% higher than white women, the report found. Their rate is also 57% higher than the rate for AANHPI women when the groups are counted together.
That difference is important because combining AANHPI populations can make cancer disparities within individual communities harder to see, researchers said.
The report, published Thursday in the American Cancer Society journal CANCER, looked at cancer incidence and survival using data from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program from 2000 through 2022.
Across the 11 AANHPI ethnic groups included in the study, overall cancer incidence varied by more than twofold.
Cambodians had the lowest overall cancer incidence rate, at 218.3 cases per 100,000 people. Native Hawaiians had the highest, at 474.5 per 100,000 — 1.5 times the rate for AANHPI people when the groups were combined.
The differences weren’t limited to breast cancer.
Colorectal cancer incidence among Native Hawaiians was 37% higher than among AANHPI people overall and 11% higher than among whites. Among AANHPI men, prostate cancer incidence was six times higher among Native Hawaiians than among Laotian men.
Breast cancer rates were also rising in nearly all of the AANHPI groups studied. The annual increase ranged from 1% among Native Hawaiians and Filipinos to 3% to 5% among Guamanian/Chamorro, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean women.
“Behind aggregated AANHPI data are populations experiencing some of the highest cancer incidence rates in the country,” said Dr. Nikita Wagle, principal scientist for cancer surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the study. “Korean people have the highest stomach cancer incidence of any racial-ethnic group in the U.S. Similarly, Vietnamese people have the highest liver cancer incidence, and Samoan women have the highest uterine corpus cancer incidence.”
The researchers say the numbers point to a need for more detailed cancer data. Looking at AANHPI populations as a single group can make it harder to see which communities face the greatest risks—and where prevention and early detection efforts may need to be more targeted.
“You can’t fix a problem you don’t know is there. Favorable rates in the AANHPI population as a whole mask the highest national burden for many cancers, including breast and endometrial cancers in women,” said Rebecca Siegel, senior scientific director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and senior author of the report. “Especially in these communities, successful interventions must be tailored, not a one-size-fits-all approach.”
The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the organization’s advocacy affiliate, is urging lawmakers to support policies that promote the timely collection and publication of disaggregated demographic data.
Lisa A. Lacasse, president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, said “We urge lawmakers to support funding and policies that promote timely and accurate collection and publication of disaggregated, demographic data, which will help ensure policy solutions are designed to address each community’s unique needs and reduce the cancer burden for everyone.”
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