That was the first critical decision that may have saved Buie's life. The second was the intensive course of chemotherapy that Mitchell prescribed. "It was hard," Buie said, "but it was good."
Now 49, she has been cancer-free for the last six years.
Mitchell's instinct that blacks tend to get more aggressive cancers is now backed by science. After analyzing more than 2,000 breast-cancer patients, she and colleagues at Jefferson found that black women were more likely to suffer a particularly aggressive and drug-resistant type of breast cancer.
These findings were released yesterday and slated for publication in the journal Cancer. Mitchell and colleagues at Jefferson hope to use what they have learned to develop drugs to target the more deadly breast tumors.
Researchers have been confounded by a paradox: Black women are less likely than white women to get breast cancer, and yet they are significantly more likely to die from the disease. Some of this can be attributed to black women's lack of access to good screening. "That gap is being closed," Mitchell said, "but the gap in mortality is still widening."
Mitchell, who went to medical school in the early 1970s, was one of only two African Americans in her class at the Medical College of Virginia. While still in medical school, she joined the Air Force and later became the first female physician to rise to the rank of brigadier general.
She decided to specialize in cancer partly because she found it fascinating to examine tumors under the microscope - something she still does with every case. As she studied slide after slide of tumors, she started to see a pattern connected to the patients' race.
