Breast cancer generally happens when
sure cells placed in the breast start to grow out of control, absorbing nearby
tissue and diffusing throughout the body.
Big collections of this contaminated tissue are called "tumors". About tumors are not even out considered to
be cancer as they cannot spread throughout the body or menace a individual
life. These cases of tumors are called
"benign tumors".
The cases of tumors that do spread
throughout the body and infest the tissues around the breast are believed to be
cancer and have been given the name "malignant tumors". It is said that any type of tissue in the
breast can cast some type of cancer, but it generally comes by either ducts or
secreters.
It can take days or even years for a
tumor to get big decent for person to actually feel it in their breast, so
they're advanced to be screened for tumors by a mammogram. Mammograms are configured to detect any case
of disease before a person even gets to look it.
Breast cancer is the common
"malignance" that affects women in America and throughout
Europe. Every single woman is at risk of
getting breast cancer and almost 200,000 cases of were said to be diagnosed in
the United States in 2001. It is the
second highest cause, behind lung cancer, of cancer deaths among women in North
America.
The characters of risk factors for
breast cancer are parted into two types, those you can't alteration and those
you can convert. The factors connected
with increasing your risk of breast cancer that your can't exchange include:
just being a woman, getting older, or having some type of family history or a
relative with breast cancer. Other risk
factors are causing your menopause late, having children by the age of thirty,
or concentrating a genetic mutation that would somehow increase your risk.
Certain types of risk factors that you
can change are:
- not taking hormone replacement
therapy (HRT), which means that long term uses of estrogens for menopause
symptoms does in fact slightly increase your risk.
- stopping the use of birth control
pills, because it is noted that ten years following the cessation of The Pill,
a woman's risk of breast cancer reverts to what it would have been if she had
not used this form of birth control.
However, neither of these risks are as
significant as the ones that are associated with your gender, age, and family
history.
All the factors are based on
probabilities, and that means that a person without any of those mentioned is
still subject to developing breast cancer and the best way to be sure is to get
the proper screening and detection for breast cancer development.
There are preventative measures that
can be taken, up to a point. It is noted
that a drug called Tamoxifen is not used widely as a prevention, but it has
been proved to be helpful in some cases.
There is also a limited amount of data that suggests that Vitamin A may
be useful in the prevention of breast cancer,
but further research is needed to prove this.
The
most important step for a woman to prevent breast cancer is to schedule regular
checkups, screenings and mammograms, learn how to perform her own exams, and
also to acquire all the information she can about the subject.