City of Hope marked the start of Breast Cancer Awareness Month with an event empowering more women to get routine cancer screening.
Physicians donned pink lab coats at City of Hope’s “Pink is Powerful” event, intended to serve as a visual reminder to the community to “take control of their breast health.”
“Early detection is vital,” President Annette Walker told the Business Journal. “When caught at its earliest stage before it has spread beyond the breast, the five-year overall survival rate for breast cancer is 99 percent.”
CalOptima Health, which is investing $50 million to expand cancer screenings, was a partner in the event.
13 Organizations Gifted $16.4M in CalOptima Grants
In August, CalOptima’s board approved the first round of community grants of its $50 million investment, distributing a total of $16.4 million to 13 organizations including Families Together of Orange County, mPulse, UCI Health Family Health Center and Share Ourselves.
CalOptima launched the program to lower incidence rates for late-stage breast, cervical, colon and lung cancer.
“Each one of these has a very unique characteristic in the sense that they’re relatively easy to discover and cure if you find it early,” Chief Medical Officer Dr. Richard Pitts told the Business Journal.
Prior to the program, Pitts said that CalOptima provided transportation and childcare support in an attempt to remove barriers preventing women from getting screened for breast cancer, but still experienced “tremendous resistance.”
“We were not able to move the needle,” Pitts said. “So, we started this cancer awareness program where the goal is to have these organizations reach out to the patients they already have.”
Besides increasing access to cancer screening, CalOptima is spending $5 million on a marketing campaign aimed at removing some of the fear and stigma around getting screened. The fall campaign includes advertising through various channels including TV, billboards and social media.
Meanwhile, City of Hope, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the country, plans to step up its mammography and other cancer services once its cancer-specific hospital opens next year.
“That’s going to really round out and deepen the number of services we have and push the envelope for clinical trials and research in cancer too,” Dr. Irene Kang, medical director of women’s health medical oncology, told the Business Journal.
City of Hope is spending $1.5 billion to expand its cancer care services in Orange County, including a 190,000-square-foot outpatient center that opened in 2022.
City of Hope Sees Rising Cases Among the Youth
More than 300,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, according to the American Cancer Society.
“I think the truly troubling trend that we’re seeing is women being diagnosed at a younger age with breast cancer,” Kang said.
City of Hope in March released a report titled “The Younger Face of Cancer,” showing that Orange County has the highest overall rate of cancer incidence in people under 50 years old compared to Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego and San Bernardino with 98.4 cases per 100,000 residents.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force only recently updated its recommended age for mammogram screenings from 50 years old to 40 years old, not including women with a strong family history of breast cancer.
“That’s mirroring this younger incidence of breast cancer that we’re seeing,” Kang said.
Women of color are also being impacted at higher rates. Recent data suggests the rate of breast cancer diagnoses rose more than 50% among Asian American Pacific Islander women under 50 from 2000 to 2021.
It’s unclear what’s driving these trends, but Kang said the stigma around screening for certain groups is “complex and certainly culturally influenced.”
