Breast Cancer

Incidence, Morality, and Risk

Transcript

• … think that if the age is 50, it should be dropped to 40, and at least if we’ve been given the all clear, maybe every two or three years for sure, a letter being sent round to the house to remind you – I mean, you get a letter about going to the dentist, and checks like that, and the most important thing, of course, is your health and the survival for the rest – for yourself and the rest of your family. So, I strongly believe that early detection and bringing that awareness to the public, be it through all sorts of media sources, is so important, because even if it affects just one person reading an article or seeing an interview saying, ‘I’m going to check myself tonight,’ it’s worth it.

Trends in breast cancer incidence and mortality reveal crucial geographic variations as well as an overall increase in breast cancer. Similar patterns exist, for example, in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. In the United States, breast cancer rates have increased about 1 percent per year since the 1940s, and by more than 40 percent from 1973 to 1998. Similarly, Canadian incidence rates rose nearly 30 percent from 1969 to 1999. Annual increases of 1 to 3 percent were recorded in Finland and the Netherlands, and between 1971 and 1987 six former regions of the Soviet Union charted gains from 2 to 4 percent.

In New South Wales, the incident rate for breast cancer rose steadily in the early to mid-1980s, and in 1995 were nearly 50 percent higher than they were in 1983. Mortality also increased in these regions from the 1950s through the 1980s but leveled off in several northern European countries, Australia, New Zealand and for white women in the United States and Canada. In general, women under age 50 saw greater declines in mortality than did older women. Although breast cancer has been relatively rare in many Asian countries, Japan has seen rising incidence rates and, to a lesser degree, growing mortality rates since the mid-1980s. Numerous studies point to increased [Page 188]risks associated with a Western lifestyle, although environmental exposures are increasingly linked to breast cancer. In general, there is considerably less cancer data in many developing countries. The data that is available shows lesser but increasing degrees of incidence and mortality.

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