This reevaluation is likely to result in changes in counseling for women in this demographic, including more recommendations to go for mammograms and more encouragement to sign up for studies of breast cancer. This last change is highly important, as assessments of lower risk based on the old formulas meant that African-American women were not selected for studies such as prevention trials. More mammograms and participation in studies will lead to more early detection and prevention, hopefully reducing the number of women who believe themselves to be perfectly healthy and are then blindsided by a breast cancer diagnosis.
Reassessments like this highlight the necessity of researching diverse populations, to make sure that patient care is not compromised by ignorance of group-specific risk factors.
The abstract of this study can be found here: Projecting Individualized Absolute Invasive Breast Cancer Risk in African American Women