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Breast cancer is often considered more deadly among younger women, but older women - particularly those over 75 - are actually more likely to die of the disease, according to an international study.

Researchers, who tracked thousands of women and published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said that among women diagnosed with a certain common type of breast cancer, those over 75 years-old were 63 per cent more likely to die of it than women under 65.

"I suspect it's undertreatment. We did show the rates of chemotherapy and radiation therapy are less in the older group,"said Stephen Jones, medical director at US Oncology Research in Texas and one of the study's authors.

The study focused on nearly 10,000 women who had already gone through menopause and who had been diagnosed with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.

That's the most common type of the disease and is considered less dangerous than the hormone receptive-negative types because it is often slower growing and might respond to hormone treatments.

Younger women are more likely than older women to have the receptor-negative cancer, and they also tend to be diagnosed at a later stage, leading to the idea that breast cancer is more deadly for them.

In the study, researchers found that five out of every 100 women diagnosed under age 65 and six out of every 100 women diagnosed between 65 and 74 years-old died from breast cancer within five years.

But among women over age 75 at the time of their diagnosis, eight out of every 100 died from the cancer.

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