Breast Cancer

About 1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer or invasive breast cancer over the course of a lifetime. One in eight. That's eight women standing in a room wondering who it's going to be.
In 2010, invasive breast cancer was expected to be diagnosed in over 200,000 new cases, while non- invasive breast cancer was expected to be diagnosed in women in more than 54,000 new cases.
Do you think breast cancer is just for women? Almost 2,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer were expected to be diagnosed in men in 2010.
Just under 40,000 women in the U.S. were expected to die in 2010 from breast cancer.
Breast cancer death rates for women in the U.S. are higher than the death rates for any other cancer, besides lung cancer.
Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among U.S. women (except for skin cancer). Breast cancer makes up for more than 1 in 4 cancers in women, or roughly 28%.
White women are a little more likely to develop breast cancer compared to African American women, but less likely to die of it. They say a possible reason is because African American women tend to have more aggressive tumors, but they don't really know why this seems to be. White women and African American women seem to have a higher risk of developing and dying from breast cancer than women of other ethnic backgrounds, such as Asian, Hispanic, and Native American.
In 2010, there were more than 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the U.S.
If a woman has an immediate family member, such as a (mother, sister, daughter) who has been diagnosed with breast cancer, then her risk of developing breast cancer roughly doubles. About a fourth of women who are diagnosed with breast cancer have a family history of breast cancer.
Gene mutations (abnormal changes) inherited from one’s mother or father can be linked to about 5-10% of breast cancer patients.
Even women with no family history of breast cancers have about a 70-80% chance of occurance. These occurances are due to genetic abnormalities that happen from the aging process and just life in general, and not from inherited mutations.
Gender (being a woman) and your age (growing older) seem to be the most significant risk factors for developing breast cancer. And neither of these things seem to be in our control.