BREAST CANCER TOO YOUNG

Breast cancer too young, There’s never the “right” time to discover you have breast cancer. When breast cancer strikes any woman’s life, it’s usually very disillusioning, frightening, and heart breaking. But, it seems, many somehow equate youth with continued vitality and naturally more evasive to an affliction so serious as breast cancer. And the bad news…the worse news…is that it’s not as predictable as most of us have long believed.

Breast cancer strikes approximately 200,000 women in the U.S. every year. However, according to cancer experts, less than 7% are under age 40, with only 5 to 10 percent of new cases found to be linked to family history, one of the most commonly believed indicators. What’s even more disturbing, and perturbing to doctors, is that many cases have shown no previous, genetic indications, despite familial instances. It appears that certain genes that would ordinarily point to a genetic proclivity for breast cancer within a family don’t always show themselves in tests. What this means is that there can be repeated cases of breast cancer within a bloodline, without those susceptibility genes that doctors would normally look for not being evident.

So what does all of this mean for younger women and their expectancy or need for concerns for developing breast cancer? Well, in part, these peculiar mutations that don’t characteristically show up for tests are not quite fully understood by cancer researchers in the area of breast cancer; more undiscovered, genetic factors are at play.

Right now, the only seemingly positive or encouraging news in all of this are statistics. Nevertheless, with cases of breast cancer detected as early as 16, you can never be too careful in safeguarding against breast cancer, and every woman, young or not-so-young, should self-exam from an early age, and teach the younger women in their lives to do so as well.