In the summer of 2018, Christina Kashiwada was traveling for work when she noticed a small itchy lump on her left breast.
At first, she didn't think much of it. She did regular self-exams and visited doctors regularly. But a relative urged her to get a mammogram. She followed the advice and found out she had stage 3 breast cancer, a revelation that stunned her.
“I'm 36, right?” said Kashiwada, a civil engineer from Sacramento, Calif. “Nobody thinks about cancer.”
In 2021, about 11,000 Asian and Pacific Islander women were diagnosed with breast cancer, and about 1,500 of them died.
The latest federal data show that the rate of new breast cancer diagnoses among Asian American and Pacific Islander women — a group that once had relatively low diagnosis rates — is rising much faster than many other racial and ethnic groups. The trend is especially noticeable among younger women like Kashiwada.