American women have a one in eight chance (12.9%) of developing breast cancer during their lifetimes, while American men have a one in 800 chance (0.13%), according to the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute.
Each year, about 264,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer, and approximately 42,000 women die from the disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports. About 2,400 men are diagnosed with breast cancer each year and some 500 men die from it annually, CDC data shows.
Since breast cancer is more commonly found in women ages 40 and older, medical professionals and organizations recommend routine breast cancer screenings for middle-aged and senior women.
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This includes mammograms — a breast cancer screening method that has led to age-based debates among experts.
There are several important breast cancer risk factors to note, say experts.
“Having one first-degree relative with breast cancer doubles a woman’s risk,” Dr. Kathleen Kiernan Harnden, director of breast oncology at the Inova Schar Cancer Institute in Annandale, Virginia, told Fox News Digital.
Other high-risk factors include a family history of breast cancer, a known genetic mutation or a previous breast biopsy, according to Harnden.
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Given this, Harnden said there are three questions all women should ask themselves before they request a mammogram consultation or appointment:
Harnden recommends 3D mammography over 2D because multiple images are taken from different angles, which may make breast tissue analysis clearer.
Here’s a deeper dive into these topics.
Breast cancer is a disease that occurs in breast tissue when cells in the breast “change and grow out of control,” according to MedlinePlus, an online health information service produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
The cells that cause breast cancer usually form a tumor — an abnormal mass of tissue.
Cancer cells and cancerous tumors (malignant) are dangerous because they can disrupt organ functions and kill healthy cells if left to spread.
This can cause serious harm or death if left untreated, according to a report from MedicalNewsToday, a medical news website owned by Healthline Media.
Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in women after skin cancer, says the National Cancer Institute.
Breast cancer diagnoses are extremely rare in teenagers. Teen girls between ages 15 and 19 have an incidence rate of 0.2 per 100,000, the CDC indicates.
Girls younger than 15 do not have a calculated breast cancer incidence rate because the CDC suppresses data when there are fewer than 16 cases, which the agency notes on its “United States Cancer Statistics: Data Visualizations” webpage.
Breast cancer incidence rates steadily increase with age, but it remains low for women under the age of 40, CDC data shows.
While not all experts agree on whether women under age 40 should receive mammograms, young women in their 20s and 30s have been diagnosed with breast cancer, according to incidence data published by the CDC, which dates back to 2019.
Women between the ages of 20 and 24 have a breast cancer incidence rate of 1.8 per 100,000.
The incidence rate jumps to 10.5 per 1000,000 women, 30.1 per 100,000 women and 64.8 per 100,000 women, for women ages 25 to 29, 30 to 34 and 35 to 39, respectively.
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H/T Fox News (read more at FoxNews.com)
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