Breast Cancer Statistics

It has become acknowledged that breast cancer is one of the most common ways of women to die from cancer, it is secondly only to lung cancer.  Although it is now the second most frequent cancer to be found in women after skin cancer.  The World Health Organisation (WHO) are now estimating that over 1,200,000 people will be diagnosed with breast cancer worldwide this year and approximately 211,420 will develop infiltrating breast cancer in the USA alone.  Then about 58,490 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in situ.  Even men can be affected by breast cancer and there will be about 1,700 cases of breast cancer in men this year.

Statistics have also revealed that about 40,410 women and 460 men are likely to die from some form of breast cancer in the USA alone this year.  In fact the American Cancer Society estimates that 1:33 women will die from breast cancer.  In fact the incidents of cancer rate have increased by about 4% during the 1980’s and then began to decrease to 100.6:100,000 women in the 1990’s.  Between 1992 and 1996 the rate of deaths related to breast cancer also decreased especially in younger women.  Doctors say this decline has occurred because of the earlier detection of the disease as well as the better treatments now being provided to patients.

Breast cancer is less common in younger women; in the case of some patients who were diagnosed in their thirties it was found that they tended to develop more severe forms of the disease.  This may explain why death by breast cancer in younger women is still high.

Any women can develop breast cancer during their life, but the older you are the higher the risk of you developing this disease.  Statistics show that about 77% of cases of breast cancer affect women who are over 50 years of age.  As for those women who are in different ethnic groups, the National Cancer Institute reports the following:-
Women who are either white, African-American or Hawaiian are going to have the highest infiltrating breast cancer rate in the USA, which is about 4 times higher than the lowest rate incidents of invasive breast cancer to be found in the USA.
However, Korean, Vietnamese and American Indian women have the lowest rate for infiltrating breast cancer in the USA.
But African-American women have the highest rate of deaths caused by breast cancer and more likely to detect the disease in the later stages only compared to other ethnic groups.  It has been found that African-American women have the highest death rate of women between the ages of 33-54 and 55-69, yet white women in the USA are more likely to die from breast cancer once over the age of 70.

There are various stages of breast cancer which start from Stage 0 (very early or the less severe stages) to Stage IV (metastasis stage).  There are also many factors which must looked at which will affect a patients survival rate such as the tumour’s characteristics, their genetic background and state of health.  In addition to all that has previously gone before there are things like stress levels, the patient’s will to live or their immune function can also play a very important role in determining the patient’s survival rate.

Statistics show that survival rates continue to decrease after 5 years, whilst survival after 10 years depends on what stage the cancer is at.  Treatment of early stage cancer means survival rates are higher than those being treated for late stage cancer.