Breast Cancer: Practical Considerations and Future Approaches

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women. There are close to 200,000 new cases of breast cancer a year, and this results in about 47,000 deaths per year, although the mortality has fallen slightly in the 1990s.

The etiology of breast cancer remains unknown but at least two breast cancer genes have been cloned–the BRCA-1 and the BRCA-2 genes. Only about 10% of all breast cancers can be explained by hereditary mutations in these genes. Most of the sporadic cases, the other 90% of the cases of breast cancer, do not seem to have mutations in these genes so there does not seem to be a common pathway gene for both sporadic and hereditary cases.

The lifetime risk of breast cancer is one in eight for a woman who is age 20. Breast cancer is a disease that increases significantly with increasing age. Breast cancer in young patients under age 50 is still a relatively rare event compared to the cumulative lifetime risk. For patients under age 60, the chance of being diagnosed with breast cancer is 1 in about 400 in a given year.