Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer type among women globally and the most common cause of cancer death in women.
The cancer caused 670, 000 deaths globally in 2022 according to statistics from the World Health Organization.
In the same year, there were 2.3 million women diagnosed with breast cancer and 670,000 deaths globally.
In 95 per cent of countries, breast cancer is the first or second leading cause of female cancer deaths.
For example in the UK, one woman is diagnosed with breast cancer every 10 minutes.
In the US, breast cancer accounts for about 30 per cent of all new female cancers each year.
In Kenya, recent data shows that breast cancer is the most common cancer among women of all ages and has the third highest mortality.
WHO indicates that nearly 80 per cent of deaths from breast and cervical cancer occur in low- and middle-income countries.
A 2020 study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer suggests that with an estimated 4.4 million women dying of cancer in 2020, nearly 1 million children were orphaned by cancer, 25% of which were due to breast cancer.
Who is at risk?
Radiation Oncologist Dr Dulcie Wanda says there is a 10 to 15 per cent chance that breast cancer could be genetic with other causes being lifestyle for example being obese.
“Replacement of hormones has been put as one of the risk factors. Others are lifestyle, being obese, lack of exercise, cigarette smoking, and alcohol use has been implicated as risk factors,” she says.
“Majority of the patients who develop this kind of cancer sometimes do not have risk factors so could be the first person in your family to develop breast cancer”.
Approximately 99 per cent of breast cancers occur in women and 0.5-1 per cent of breast cancers occur in men.
What are the signs and symptoms of breast cancer?
Breast cancer can have combinations of symptoms, especially when it is more advanced.
Getting to know what your breasts look and feel like normally means it’s easier to spot any unusual changes and check them with your doctor.
Symptoms of breast cancer can include a breast lump or thickening, change in size, shape or appearance of the breast, dimpling, redness, pitting or other changes in the skin, change in nipple appearance or the skin surrounding the nipple and abnormal or bloody fluid from the nipple.
“The sad bit is that most people ignore a lump, a small ulcer on the breast, ignore colour changes, skin changes and by the time they want to give it attention the disease is advanced,” Dr Wanda notes.
How to reduce the risk of breast cancer
Everyone can take steps to lower their chances of getting breast cancer by making healthy changes and living well now, including drinking less alcohol, maintaining a healthy weight and keeping physically active.
Treatment
Doctors combine treatments to minimize the chances of the cancer coming back. These include surgery to remove the breast tumour, radiation therapy to reduce recurrence risk in the breast and surrounding tissues and medications to kill cancer cells and prevent spread, including hormonal therapies, chemotherapy or targeted biological therapies.
“There is something we can do about it for example if you are at the age of 40 and above we can do a mammogram such that before the lump is even big, before it becomes something you can feel then the mammogram can show us and this helps to catch the cancer early,” Dr Wanda says.
Johns Hopkins describes a mammogram as an X-ray examination of the breast. It is used to detect and diagnose breast disease in women who have breast problems, such as a lump, pain, or nipple discharge, as well as for women who have no breast complaints.
The procedure allows the detection of breast cancers, benign tumours, and cysts before they can be detected by palpation (touch).
In 2023, the WHO released a new Global Breast Cancer Initiative providing a roadmap to attain the targets to save 2.5 million lives from breast cancer by 2040.
Reducing global breast cancer mortality by 2.5 per cent per year would avert 25 per cent of breast cancer deaths by 2030 and 40 per cent by 2040 among women under 70 years of age.
The three pillars toward achieving these objectives are health promotion for early detection; timely diagnosis; and comprehensive breast cancer management.