We all have a dread of breast cancer. Our fears are based on the common perception that it’s a ‘bad’ cancer to get. This is because it has a reputation for spreading quickly and for recurring after treatment. The treatments are also feared: women have heard that breast surgery may be mutilating, and that non-surgical treatments may have unpleasant side-effects. The diagnosis of breast cancer has a profound emotional impact because of these fears and because it affects a part of the body intimately linked with a woman’s self-image and sexuality.
By the time we reach middle age, most of us will know at least one breast-cancer victim. This disease affects 7 per cent of Australian women – about one in fifteen -making it the most common form of cancer in women in our country.
What causes breast cancer?
We don’t know. A recent theory is that some women carry a gene that makes them more likely to develop breast cancer. This gene affects breast cells so that they respond differently to the hormones that our ovaries produce, eventually becoming cancerous.
Who is at risk?
Older women are at more risk than younger women. The mothers, sisters and daughters of women who developed breast cancer before their menopause or in both breasts are two to three times more likely to develop the disease than those with no family history. But more than eight out of ten women with breast cancer do not have a mother, sister or daughter with this disease.
Women who have had cancer in one breast are at increased risk of developing it in the other, but treatment with anti-oestrogen drugs has been shown recently to decrease this risk by 40 per cent in postmenopausal women.
Some factors may increase the risk slightly:
• having your first baby after the age of 30
• having no children
• late menopause (over the age of 55)
• obesity, which is linked with late menopause.
Here are some more facts about the risk.
• Bumps or injuries to the breast are not associated with an increased risk.
• Breast-feeding has no effect on the risk of breast cancer.
• Postmenopausal hormone replacement’ therapy has been associated with an in-1 creased risk when taken continuously’ for 10 years or more.
• The risk of breast cancer for women is 100 times greater than it is for men.
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