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What
can I do to prevent breast cancer? What is the best way to find my
cancer early, before it has spread? These are two of the most common
questions women have. Here's what we know:
Breast Cancer Prevention
There is nothing that you can do to ensure that you absolutely do not
get breast cancer. But there are some things that appear to help reduce breast cancer risk.
Breast Cancer Detection
For decades, women have heard that the best hope of curing breast
cancer is finding it early. To that end, doctors have taught women
about the importance of three breast cancer screening techniques:
breast self-exam, clinical breast exam (a breast exam done by a health
professional), and mammography. This emphasis on breast cancer
screening has perpetuated the belief that all breast cancers can be
cured if they are found early. It also leads people to believe that all
women who survive breast cancer do so because their cancer was found
early.
The latest
research, however, indicates that neither of these beliefs appears to
be true. It now looks like there are about six different types of
breast cancer that vary in how aggressive they are. Some of them are so
"good" that they will never metastasize (spread throughout the body).
And that means it doesn't matter when you find them. They just don't
have the ability to cause someone to die of breast cancer. Others are
very "bad" and so aggressive that no matter when you find them—which
means even if you find them when they are still very small—they have
already begun to wreak havoc. These are the types of cancers that cause
women to die of this disease. Still others, probably about 30 percent,
have the potential to become "bad" if not stopped early. These are the
cancers whose outcomes are affected by breast cancer screening programs
and early detection. These are also the cancers mammography is best at
finding.
So is the
concept of "early detection" a total falsehood? Not really. There are
some cancers that we truly can detect early. What is misleading is the
idea that every cancer has the potential to be found early by our
current techniques. Right now, unfortunately, we are limited by both
our techniques and our understanding of breast cancer. Screening is
still our best tool for changing the mortality rate of breast cancer.
We need to take full advantage of it while working very hard to find
something better.
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| Is it necessary to do monthly breast self-exam? |
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The idea of breast self-exam (BSE) originated in the 1950s, before mammography. It was hoped that BSE would encourage women to touch their breasts and find cancerous lumps earlier, when they were still operable. Over the next 40 years, BSE grew into a standardized technique to find breast cancer early, with the implication that this would save lives. There’s just one problem: No study ever has found that BSE saves lives. MORE >
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| When should you start having mammograms? |
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Mammography is good at finding those cancers for which early detection does make a difference. And if you have one of these cancers you certainly want to find it early. But when you should start looking for those cancers with mammography is not easy to answer. Everyone agrees that women age 50 and older should have mammograms. But there has been quite a controversy for a number of years now as to whether women between the ages of 40 and 49 should also have annual mammograms. MORE >
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