Springfield High School students experience breast cancer research and contemplate breast cancer healthcare disparities through the Baystate Springfield Educational Partnership. The following article is written by one of the student summer scholars in the program, Raechel Parent.

Health disparities in medicine have been a huge issue for many years now and according to the CDC defined as "preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations''. Specifically in research, health disparities can greatly affect the overall understanding of a condition or disease. We are interested in the disparities that are a result of lack of research into particular populations. While many disparities in this disease can be attributed to either socioeconomic differences or access to healthcare, some of the variances are also due to the fact that the vast majority of breast cancer research being performed today is on cells derived from Caucasian women. As we know, breast cancer is certainly not a disease that only affects Caucasian women, and differences in the rates of breast cancer subtypes from different parts of the world suggest that genetic background may contribute to some of the variation. For example, within Africa the rates of triple negative breast cancer are significantly higher in West Africa than East Africa, where the rates are more similar to those observed in the US. Thus, when tissues and cells from just one population are being studied, it leaves large gaps in knowledge regarding the disease in patients of different demographics. To think of health disparities in a simpler context, think of someone who was writing a book on the best dog treats but only ever looked at Golden Retrievers, if you had a pug or a husky that data would not mean much to you right? Then why would we want a similar undertaking occurring in a practice as important as cancer research?