-funded medical research agency, should do more to understand why, the report by the National Research Council`s Institute of Medicine said. The report compiles data from many studies on who gets cancer, which kills one in four Americans. For instance, black men are more prone to prostate cancer, Asian-Americans are more likely to develop stomach and liver cancer and rates of cervical cancer are high among women of Hispanic and Vietnamese descent. Black women are more likely than white women to die of breast cancer and Native Americans are less likely to survive cancer than anyone else in the country. The report says some people in these groups may go to doctors later, so their cancer is diagnosed at a later, and less treatable, stage. But these groups also are more likely to develop cancer in the first place. "African-American males, for example, develop cancer 15 percent more frequently than white males," the report reads. Race is not always a factor. "In Appalachian Kentucky, for example, a region characterised by high rates of poverty, the incidence of lung cancer among white males was 127 per 100,000 in 1992, a rate higher than for any ethnic minority group in the United States during the same period," it said. Mutations in genes such as the BRCA1 breast cancer gene are likely to be to blame for just 3 to 5 percent of cancers, the report said. "Behavioral factors (e.g. smoking), environmental factors (e.g. chemical and viral exposure) and socioeconomic factors (e.g. availability, affordability and accessibility of diagnostic, therapeutic and preventive services) are likely to be the major links," the report said.