Category: Breast Cancer

More than two-thirds of doctors who completed breast fellowships in 2005 and 2006 spend all their time in breast practice.

If used with appropriate diagnostic criteria, MRI is much more sensitive than mammography for detecting breast cancers before they have developed to an invasive stage, and particularly good at identifying those lesions which are more likely to progress to dangerous forms of cancer, according to a study published in The Lancet.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is pleased to again serve as a national co-sponsor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM). ACOG supports NBCAM efforts to raise awareness about early detection and mammography screenings during October and throughout the year.

If a patient’s breast cancer is detected early enough, the five-year survival rate is well over 95%, say experts. In 2005 breast cancer caused 502,000 deaths worldwide. It is estimated that about 12% of all women either already have or will develop breast cancer during their lifetime. Globally, breast cancer is the firth most common cause of cancer death, after lung cancer, stomach cancer, liver cancer and colon cancer.

Fetal cells that persist in a woman’s body long after pregnancy — a common occurrence known in scientific circles as fetal microchimerism — in some cases may reduce the woman’s risk of breast cancer, according to researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The findings, published in the Oct. 1 issue of Cancer Research, add to the Jekyll and Hyde characteristics of fetal microchimerism, or FMc, which has been found to be both detrimental and beneficial to women’s health.

While awareness of breast cancer is high, a new survey released by the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC) reveals potentially critical knowledge gaps among American women and a sense of urgency about the nature of progress required in the research and treatment of breast cancer, which is expected to claim the lives of some 40,000 women in the U.S. this year.

One of the largest individual studies of the effects of alcohol on the risk of breast cancer has concluded that it makes no difference whether a woman drinks wine, beer or spirits (liquor) - it is the alcohol itself (ethyl alcohol) and the quantity consumed that is likely to trigger the onset of cancer.

A large US study suggests that it did not matter whether women drank beer, wine or spirits, they all raised the risk of breast cancer to the same extent. And more than three alcoholic drinks a day raised breast cancer risk by 30 per cent, compared to women who had less than one drink a day, said the researchers.