Burden of Disease
Last Updated on Thu, 11 Feb 2016 | Family Medicine
Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in U.S. women; in 2008, an estimated 182,460 cases of invasive cancer and 67,770 cases of in situ breast cancer were diagnosed, with 40,480 breast cancer deaths (ACS, 2009). The risk for breast cancer increases with age: the 10-year risk for breast cancer is 1 in 69 for a woman at age 40 years, 1 in 42 at age 50, and 1 in 29 at age 60 (SEER, 2009). Several tools are available to predict risk of developing breast cancer for individual women (e.g., BRCAPRO, Gail, Claus, Tyrer-Cuzick). All these tools incorporate age and number of first-degree relatives with breast cancer into the calculations (Nelson et al., 2005). One example is found at www.cancer.gov/bcrisktool/.