Factors Associated with Initial Mode of Breast Cancer Detection among Black Women in the Women’s Circle of Health Study

Table 1

Sociodemographic characteristics of Black women age 40-75 years in the Women’s Circle of Health Study (WCHS), overall and by initial mode of breast cancer detection.

	Overall	Screening mammogram	Clinical breast exam	Self-detection	P-value
	(N = 1322)	(n = 725)	(n = 63)	(n = 534)
	N ()	n ()	n ()	n ()
Age at diagnosis (years), mean±SD	54.19±10.7	57.35±9.2	51.44±11.1	50.17±11.1	<0.001
Age at diagnosis (years)					<0.001
40-49	325 (24.6)	147 (20.3)	17 (27.0)	161 (30.2)
50-59	431 (32.6)	248 (34.2)	17 (27.0)	166 (31.1)
60-75	449 (34.0)	318 (43.9)	17 (27.0)	114 (21.4)
Marital					0.494
Married or living as married	576 (43.6)	326 (45.0)	25 (39.7)	225 (42.1)
Unmarried	746 (56.4)	399 (55.0)	38 (60.3)	309 (57.9)
Education					0.390
High school/vocational/technical graduate or below	538 (40.7)	311 (42.9)	25 (39.7)	202 (37.8)
Some post-secondary education	327 (24.7)	167 (23.0)	13 (20.6)	147 (27.5)
College graduate or above	456 (34.5)	246 (33.9)	25 (39.7)	185 (34.6)
Annual household					0.224
<$70,000	765 (57.9)	400 (55.2)	37 (58.7)	328 (61.4)
≥$70,000	480 (36.3)	282 (38.9)	21 (33.3)	177 (33.2)
Primary health insurance at					<0.001
Private	775 (58.6)	413 (57.0)	39 (61.9)	323 (60.5)
Medicaid	130 (9.8)	65 (9.0)	8 (12.7)	57 (10.7)
Medicare	193 (14.6)	140 (19.3)	10 (15.9)	43 (8.1)
Uninsured	131 (9.9)	51 (7.0)	5 (7.9)	75 (14.0)
Other	81 (6.1)	50 (6.9)	1 (1.6)	30 (5.6)
Missing	12 (0.9)	6 (0.8)	0 (0.0)	6 (1.1)

The unmarried category is composed of those who reported being single/never married, separated, divorced, or widowed.
$70,000 is the median income among households in New Jersey and was used as the cut-point to dichotomize the income variable.
The “other” insurance category includes forms of insurance reported by WCHS participants that did not fall into one of the four main categories above and included the following types of insurance coverage: school-provided, national government-provided [foreign country], spousal insurance, health center care, charity care, health savings account, and Veterans Affairs coverage.