The possibility of hearing a positive breast cancer diagnosis sends a chill down the spine of even the most stoic woman. While the medical community does not know everything about the causes of breast cancer yet, strides are made every day toward gaining a more complete understanding of the disease. However, they have been able to rule out or confirm certain risk factors and they myths associated with them.

Does A Person’s Weight Cause Cancer?
While not all obese women will end up a victim of breast cancer, obesity is a proven risk factor for it. Fatty tissue stores estrogen and other hormones as well as pollutants brought into the body through food, smoking and other sources. For those reasons, large amounts of extra fat are a risk factor.

Does Regular Exercise Decrease the Risk of Cancer?
For the reason mentioned above, losing weight through exercise can only increase the body’s ability to resist cancer. Exercise also helps with circulation and it has been proven to boost the immune system to help fight off potential cancer cells from forming.

Does Diet Have an Effect on Breast Cancer?
A diet rich in red meat and animal fat seems to have an adverse affect on the body. Research has begun to show that when a woman eats a lot of red meat, bacon, lard or high fat dairy products, her chances of receiving a diagnosis of cancer is much greater than those of a woman who restricts those items in her diet. Not only is the actual food product mentioned above a risk factor because of the cholesterol they contain, but these food items are often filled with hormones, antibiotics and pesticides which are then retained in the woman’s body.

The first sign of cancer that a woman usually notices is a lump, which is how more than eighty percent of all breast cancer cases are discovered. If the lump can be felt, it has most likely been growing for several years. This type of lump feels noticeably different from the other breast tissue. More frequently today, due to the increased number of women choosing to have a mammogram at a younger age, masses are found when they are much smaller, when they cannot be felt yet by doing a self exam.

Other unusual changes that may indicate cancer, but could also be due to another issue, are dimpling of the skin, unusual changes in the shape or size of one breast, discharge from only one nipple or a newly inverted nipple. When a nipple begins to flake and have pain and burning or itching, this is known as Paget’s Disease which is a type of breast cancer not linked to hormones. When cancer grows in the small vessels that lie directly below the thin breast skin, this is type of breast cancer known as Inflammatory Breast Cancer, and it makes the skin resemble the dimples of an orange peel and is also not linked to hormones.

Any unusual changes in the size or shape of the breast, nipple discharge or strange sensations in the breast should be reported to the doctor at the next scheduled visit, but it is important to remember that changes do occur in the breast tissue that are unrelated to cancer. Some perfectly normal changes include general lumpiness, generalized breast pain, abcesses, discharge from the nipple, inflamed blood vessels, fat necrosis, cysts (which are sacs that fill with fluid occassionally) and certain painless lumps that can be moved around under the skin. It is always best to talk with the doctor about any new symptom if even for no other reason than to gain peace of mind.

The medical community has designed a list of several risk factors for breast cancer. While a woman may fall into one of these categories because she has a listed risk factor, it is in no way attempting to tell her future and designate her to become a breast cancer patient. This list was compiled after several decades of research.

Personal Breast Cancer History
If a woman has already suffered breast cancer in one of her breasts, she is more likely to acquire cancer in the other side. Many women choose to have both of their breasts removed even if one is cancer free because of this risk. Some of these women choose to go permanently without breasts and others choose to have implants inserted and once again enjoy a little perkiness.

Family Cancer History
If the other females in a woman’s family have had breast cancer, she is more likely to have it than a woman with no family history of the disease. This risk goes even higher if the relative who had cancer found it before she was forty years old. These relatives can be on her mother’s or father’s side.

Race
Women of European descent have higher incidents of breast cancer than women whose bloodline comes from Africa or Asia.

Lifestyle Choices
If a woman chooses not to have children or has them later in life, she is higher risk than women who had children before the age of twenty five or women who had several children. Also, women who breastfed their child has a lower risk. Women who keep themselves at a healthy weight, do not frequently drink alcohol and remain physically active had fewer incidents of breast cancer.

Being Female
The highest risk factor of all for breast cancer is being a woman. While men do account for some of the new breast cancer cases every year, this disease so dominately effects women that it is rarely even listed as a risk factor.

Breast cancer screening is performed on any woman regardless of whether she has any of the symptoms of breast cancer if she and her doctor feel the need for it. Screening has become a popular practice among doctors and patients alike because if a mass of cells is found early, breast cancer is a completely survivable disease. The test used to screen a patient are self exams, genetic screening, mammograms, ultrasounds and MRIs.

During a self exam, the woman looks for lumps or unusual changes in the tissue. Unfortunately, once the lump has been noticed is has alreay grown very large. Mammograms have been the standard test for breast cancer for many years but recently they too have come under fire because of the number of unneccessary surgeries and worries the patient must endure. Nevertheless, mammograms are recommended for women who have at least one risk factor for the disease.

When cancer is found, the initial treatment is almost always surgery to remove the mass. Once the existing cancer is removed, surgery is followed up by chemotherapy and radiation. The treatment is slightly different for each of the stages of cancer, and occassionally a woman’s individual circumstances will determine another course of action.

There are three groups of medications available after the surgery: Monoclonal antibodies, chemotherapy and hormone blocking therapy. One or all of these can be used. Monoclonal antibodies cause cells to stop growing. Many patients tolerate this medication better than chemotherapy but it can cause heart trouble in some patients. Chemotherapy kills the DNA in cancer cells but it also destroys the DNA in all of the other cells in the body. Hormone blocking therapy works because it blocks the estrogen that some cancer cells require to grow. Since not all breast cancers are hormone-related, this medication does not work for all patients.

The doctor will recommend a treatment according to how he believes the cancer can be cured, but it is always up to the patient to decide which of the medications and treatments they will use.

Breast cancer is a disease that primarily affects women, but new cases of breast cancer show up in men every year. If a man is exposed to higher than normal levels of estrogen such as occurs with certain diseases like cirrhosis of the liver, he is at risk for breast cancer. Some doctors believe that it is for this reason that the disease is seen mostly in older men whose testosterone level has begun to drop off. Other risk factors include having been exposed to radiation and having other members of the family with breast cancer, especially if they have an altered BRCA2 gene.

It is easier for a man to detect a lump in the breast region but it is important to remember that lumps can be caused for a variety of reasons. Men are not given mammograms or MRIs because the cancer is usually found before it is very large.

There are several tests available to find out if the lump is cancerous. A biopsy is likely to be the first test performed to find out what the lump is made of. Next a procedure is performed to test how many hormone receptors are in the lump. This test will tell the doctor if hormone therapy will stop the lump from growing. The third test checks for a growth protein. Cancer cells make a protein which encourages more cells to grow. If that protein is found in the lump, there is a medication called monoclonal antibody which can stop the lumps growth.

The survival rate of breast cancer patients is the same for men and women when they are at the same diagnostic stage, but mens cancer is usually found at a much later stage where is is not as easy to cure. Some other reasons for a poor prognosis include whether or not the cancer is also in the other breast and the patient’s physical health and age.

When the cells in mammary glands and the surrounding tissue grow in an uncontrolled way, it is called breast cancer. In order to understand how this may happen, it is important to understand the cells that make up the human body. In the very center of a cell resides a gene. Genes are kind of like a computer for the cell. Cells have a blueprint to follow which is an orderly series of events allowing new, healthy cells to replace the old cells. Unfortunately, occasionally a cell does not form properly and then each cell that comes after to replace that one is also deformed. As these cells multiply and form a lump, they become known as a tumor.

There are two types of tumor: benign and malignant. A benign tumor is not considered dangerous but malignant tumors are cancerous and can eventually invade other parts of the body. These malignant tumors are called ‘breast cancer’ because they originated in that part of the body. Most commonly the cancer begins in the milk-producing glands but occasionally the connective tissues are the starting point. Regardless of where the cancer begins in the breast, these cells will find their way into the lymph nodes near the armpit giving them a clear path to every other part of the body.

In most cases of breast cancer, the cells mutate because of environmental factors like pollutants and pesticides, hormonal imbalance, obesity and just aging in general. Only less than ten percent of breast cancer cases is due to heredity. Some things that people can do to limit their cancer risk factor is to exercise regularly, eat a well balanced diet that includes fiber and antioxidants and reduce the stress of everyday life. If a person is diagnosed with cancer, it is not productive to worry and have guilt about things that they could have done differently.

By the time a woman has had her first gynecological exam, her mother or her doctor has already instructed her on how to check for breast cancer. While a self exam is a good practice and no one should be discouraged from doing it regularly, a woman can not feel a lump in her breast until it has already gotten past a certain size. A more effective exam is the mammogram, which can see very tiny masses of cells and give the patient a better chance of surviving the cancer.

A mammogram is an x-ray performed while the breast is compressed. When the breast tissue is compressed, the tissue is forced to spread outward so that a better picture can be taken. The patient feels some pressure or squeezing while the exam is taking place, but the most uncomfortable portion of the exam only takes a moment to complete for each breast. The breasts are x-rayed individually and the whole exam should only take about twenty minutes.

The doctor who takes the x-ray is called a radiologist, and she will check the pictures for unusual areas of tissue and for differences between the patients breasts. She will also compare the current x-ray with those that were taken in the past. The doctor will look for masses or lumps with irregular edges since benign masses usually have a smooth outline. She will also look for masses of calcium that are tiny as opposed to larger ones which are usually caused by aging.

If the mammogram shows an area that concerns the doctor, she will ask for more tests. Choices available to her include an ultrasound which uses sound waves to see an image of the breast tissue, an MRI which uses the power of a magnet to make a picture with much detail or she may order a biopsy which removes some of the tissue in question to determine if the mass is cancer.

One of the known risk factors for breast cancer is fluctuating levels of the hormone called estrogen. Estrogen is an important hormone that causes a girl to develop curves, maintain a pregnancy and in helping a mother produce breast milk to nourish her child. Estrogen, along with a few other female hormones, needs to remain at steady levels because fluctuations cause myriad problems. It is believed that when a woman goes through life with her hormones out of control, including estrogen levels that are too high, breast cancer can result.

When a woman breastfeeds her child, her hormones equalize because of the milk production. When ovulation is suppressed by breastfeeding and then the ducts which produce milk physically change, these are things that scientists point to as possible factors in reducing the risk of breast cancer.

Since pregnancy and breastfeeding both create a stable estrogen presence, it is interesting to note a recent study performed by the American Association for Cancer Research. It showed that women who began having children early in their life or who had several children seemed to be protected from cancerous masses fueled by estrogen even if they did not breastfeed, but not cancers caused by factors other than hormones. Women who chose to have their first child in their late twenties and thirties did not have the same protection from either type of cancer. It is to be noted that breastfeeding protected each group of women from both types of cancerous tumors in their breast tissue.

Some people believe that the protection from cancer given through breastfeeding reaches farther than the mother. Since breastfed children are generally less obese than children who were bottle fed, and that breastfed babies are given special immunization through the breast milk, many experts think that these children have been given a healthy edge against cancer that bottle fed babies were not.

While there is no one that believes having breast cancer is a picnic or anything anyone would want to go through, there is the perception that it’s a pretty cut and dry process as far as cancer goes. They feel like it’s the removal of the breast and then it’s the healing and wait and see. While there are versions of the breast cancer story that go like that there is far more to it than just the removal of the breast. There are the unplanned moments and the mental toll that going through breast cancer can have on a patient and the people around them.

When a person is diagnosed with the disease there is the initial operation to remove the breast. This is almost always the way it goes but that doesn’t mean there are not other options. As a matter of fact the early fear is that the cancer is more advanced and may have spread to the lymph nodes. If not, doctors may still need to do exploratory surgery to just make sure you are not dealing with something bigger than the initial diagnosis.

Of course when going through these things you have to wonder and worry about possible prescription drug side effects. It’s one of the things that people rarely think about but with all the new drugs coming into the body and all the anguish that the body is going through there is no telling exactly how much could be affected when drugs enter in.

The other issue is the mental issue for any cancer patient. Dealing with the possibility of death, no matter how optimistic the doctors are is enough to make anyone depressed and this depression can cause problems in everyday life. That’s why it’s so important to lean on family and friends in such difficult times.

You may buy pet insurance to protect your pet (and your wallet) from the costly expenses pet health can bring, but your pet may be able to save your life from breast cancer. Some early detectors of breast cancer say their dog is responsible for sniffing out the problem. The insinuation that dogs can smell breast cancer led to several research studies. Since dogs have been known to sniff out other health problems and other cancers in humans, detecting breast cancer is not that far-fetched.

In fact, the results of the studies show that dogs have a 99 percent accuracy rate in detecting lung cancer and breast cancer. With a sniffer that ranges from 10,000 to 100,000 times better than humans, what you can’t smell, your dog can.

The Study

To perform the breast cancer sniffing study, some dogs were borrowed from the organization, Guide Dogs for the Blind. The dogs were trained to sniff out breast cancer and lung cancer through a three-week training course. Human patients, 86 in total, were used in the study. The patients had been diagnosed with cancer, but had not yet started any kind of treatment. Mixed in with the cancer patients were 83 other humans who did not have cancer.

Each human was asked to breathe into a test tube, which was capped and then presented to the dog. The dog would not react to test tubes of the noncancerous patients, but would sit or lay down when sniffing test tubes of the cancer patients. As an added bonus, dogs seem to be able to sniff cancer at any stage—be it early or late. This means that dogs may be able to help in the early detection of breast cancer and other cancers so patients can obtain treatment and possibly save their lives.