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Women from rural locales are becoming less and less likely to survive a bout with breast cancer, a pair of new studies from the American Cancer Society show. Breast cancer death rates are now higher in rural areas than in cities, according to a study presented at the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

What's more, the breast cancer survival gap between rural and urban women has nearly tripled in recent years, according to another study presented at the same meeting.

"What stands out is not simply that women in rural communities experienced worse breast cancer survival, but that the gap widened over time," said Jingxuan Zhao, principal scientist of health services research at the American Cancer Society and lead researcher of the second study.

"At a time when breast cancer detection and treatment have improved substantially, our findings raise concern that the benefits of those advances may not be reaching women in rural communities," Zhao said in a news release.

The first study found that breast cancer death rates in rural regions exceeded those in metropolitan areas between 2018 and 2023, based on data from U.S. cancer registries and federal health agencies.

That's a reversal from 1995 to 1999, when rural women were less likely to die from breast cancer than their urban counterparts, according to results from a team led by Xuesong Han, scientific director of health services research at the American Cancer Society.

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