Use of mammography for breast cancer screening has improved among foreign-born women living in the United States. However, these women are still less likely to have undergone screening than native-born American women as reported by the Fourth AACR Conference on The Science of Cancer Health Disparities held in September, 2011. Inadequate or lack of access to health insurance and a regular family doctor or healthcare service is felt to influence this lower percentage rate of use according to research conducted at Pennsylvania State University.
To put this into perspective, mammography screening rates among immigrant women in 2000 was about 60.2 percent and rose to 65.5 percent in 2008. The disparity between immigrant women and native-born American women using mammography decreased from 11.2 percent in 2000 to 3.4 percent in 2008, or about 7.8 percent over eight years.
Immigrants who had taken residence in the United States for ten years or longer were found to have higher mammography screening rates than those who had been living in the country for less than a decade.
In 2008 it was reported that immigrant women who rely on public insurance programs were twice as likely to receive a screening mammogram as those who were uninsured. And, immigrants with private insurance were more than 2.5 times more likely to be screened than the uninsured. Having a regular primary care physician or healthcare service showed that the women were twice as likely to receive mammography as those who did not have a regular source of health care.
While it is obvious that there has been more attention placed on the disparity of care between native-born American women and immigrants, there is still an overall need to improve access to mammography screening for immigrant women, and women overall.
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