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The trends for Hispanic women are alarming — showing they may be developing breast cancer much earlier than expected, with those born in this country at highest risk.

Surveys taken at clinics in the United States and Mexico suggest Hispanic women are getting this cancer as much as 10 years younger than other women — in their 50s, rather than their 60s, the typical age for Anglo women.

"This is being noticed on both sides of the border," said Maria Elena Martinez, co-director of cancer prevention and control at the Arizona Cancer Center.

"Not only are clinics seeing a lot more breast cancer cases in recent years, but it is happening to younger women. It is the most striking finding."

However, these are unverified reports, leading only to a strong suspicion about the trend. For that reason, University of Arizona cancer researchers are launching a binational, large-scale study of the problem along with researchers in Texas and Mexico.

Some 40 experts from the Arizona Cancer Center, the M.D. Anderson Center in Houston, and three universities in Mexico are meeting in Tucson Monday and Tuesday to get the project under way, with a $1 million grant from the Avon Foundation.

"If we don't make the effort to understand breast cancer as this population ages and adopts lifestyles common to the U.S., we could be looking at a major public-health problem and higher burden of disease," Martinez said.

Although decades of research have been done on breast cancer in this country, almost all of it has centered on Anglo women, she said.

And there do seem to be some major differences in the behavior of the disease in the two groups. Preliminary studies are showing not only that Hispanic women seem to develop tumors at an earlier age, they also are seeking treatment at a later stage, when the cancer is more advanced and more deadly.

In addition, these data also suggest that Hispanic women born in the United States face a higher risk of breast cancer than women living in the United States but born in Mexico.

But no one knows why these trends are occurring.

"The real issue is — what is causing this? There really are no working theories about these differences," Martinez said.

"Part of it could be that Hispanic women overall are a younger population, but I honesty don't think that explains it entirely. We do know that this population is changing rapidly, with a lot of movement across the border.

"Right now, there is a huge debate over whether physical or cultural factors are affecting these trends, or a combination of both."

For example, there are certain lifestyle risk factors for breast cancer in Anglo women — having fewer children at a later age, exposure to industrial pollutants, smoking, poor diet, obesity, lack of exercise — that are being increasingly adopted by Hispanic women in both countries, Martinez said. Access to health care, or lack of it, may also be playing a role.

But there is also some physical evidence that breast tumors are biologically different in Hispanic and Anglo women, most notably in their hormonal factors, Martinez said.

In the effort to find out what is really going on and why, researchers plan to recruit about 1,200 Hispanic women with breast cancer into the study — about 900 from Mexico and 325 from Tucson and Houston.

Samples of tumor tissue, blood and saliva will be analyzed, along with questionnaire answers from the women. The $1 million Avon grant will pay for a two-year pilot study. After that, researchers will seek funding from the National Cancer Institute for a larger five-year project.