Marking Breast Cancer Awareness Month Progress: “Little by little becomes a lot” –anonymous
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ccording to the American Cancer Society, the good news is we are making progress. Breast cancer death rates declined 40 percent from 1989 to 2016 among women. The progress is attributed to improvements in early detection, a new personalized approach to treatment and a better understanding of the disease. After skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in women in the United States. Breast cancer can occur in both men and women, but it's far more common in women. When breast cancer is detected early, and is in the localized stage, the five-year relative survival rate is 99 percent. Many breast cancer symptoms are invisible and not
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noticeable without a professional screening, but some symptoms can be caught early just by being proactive about your breast health. That means doing monthly breast selfexams and scheduling regular clinical breast exams and mammograms. In other news, although a decades-long decline in the breast cancer death rate continues, breast cancer incidences are on the rise by 0.3 percent per year since 2004, largely because of rising rates of local stage (confined to the breast) and hormone receptor-positive (HR+) disease. (Women with hormone receptor-positive cancers tend to have a better outlook in the short-term.) The increase in rates of HR+ breast cancer is likely driven in part by the increasing prevalence of excess body weight and declining ferHappeningsPA.com
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tility rates – risk factors that are more strongly associated with this subtype. In contrast, incidence rates have decreased for hormone receptor-negative breast cancer, which is associated with poorer survival. The lifetime risk of a breast cancer diagnosis is now rounded to 13 percent (12.8 percent, previously 12.4 percent), which still equates to about 1 in 8 women diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime. The 10-year probability of a breast cancer diagnosis is highest for women in their 70s (4 percent), whereas the 10-year risk of breast cancer death is highest in women in their 80s (1 percent). As of January 1, 2019, there were more than 3.8 million women with a history of breast cancer living October 2021
