BREAST CANCER MORTALITY RATES DROPPED by a whopping 58 percent in the U.S. from 1975 to 2019.
These reductions are associated with earlier detection via mammogram screening and better treatment tools.
As someone annually involved in the care of hundreds of women with breast cancer, the report grabbed my attention.
Goals
Today, we explore a simulation model that quantifies associations between screening mammography and treatment (of non-metastatic cancer) with reductions in breast cancer mortality.
But let’s start with some thoughts about breast cancer. We’ll pivot to how we are making progress against breast cancer.
I’ll end with some top tips to lower your breast cancer risk.
Thoughts
To my friends and patients who did not survive their breast cancer, I offer this:
“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”
― Pablo Neruda
For my dear patients who face potions such as chemotherapy, endocrine therapy, or other systemic treatments, I offer this passage from The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer:
“Future physicians may laugh at our mixing of primitive cocktails of poisons to kill the most elemental and magisterial disease known to our species. But much about this battle will remain the same: the relentlessness, the inventiveness, the resilience, the queasy pivoting between defeatism and hope, the hypnotic drive for universal solutions, the disappointment of defeat, the arrogance and the hubris.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Finally, a reminder of the struggle:
“Diseases desperate grown,
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Study
CISNET, short for the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network, is a group that uses computer models to study how regular mammograms and the treatment of breast cancer at different stages can help lower the number of deaths from breast cancer.
The organization aims to understand how these interventions can reduce mortality related to breast cancer across various stages.
Details
The team gathered information from various sources, including real-life observations and data from clinical trials, to study how screening for breast cancer and its treatment impact the number of deaths from breast cancer.
They used computer models from CISNET to simulate the rates of women dying from breast cancer in the United States.
The simulations considered factors like age, years from 1975 to 2019, and the specific characteristics of the cancer, such as estrogen receptor and ERBB2 status.
Improvements
Back in 1975, 48 out of every 100,000 women in the U.S. sadly lost their lives to breast cancer.
Fast forward to 2019, and this number dropped to 27 per 100,000 women.
Why?
The good news is that this decline is thanks to a mix of factors:
- Regular breast cancer screening.
- Treating breast cancer that has not spread to distant sites.
- Dealing with advanced (metastatic) breast cancer.
All these efforts combined resulted in a 58 percent decrease in breast cancer deaths by 2019.
Digging into the details, about 29 percent of this improvement is attributed to better treatments for advanced breast cancer, 47 percent to treating early stages of breast cancer, and 25 percent to the use of screening mammograms.
So, different aspects of screening and treatment played important roles in reducing the number of women losing their lives to breast cancer.
Impressive – Surviving breast cancer
I love the more than halving (58 percent) of breast cancer mortality from 1975 to 2019.
While nearly half of the gain in mortality reduction is secondary to treatment advances, about a quarter is due to breast cancer screening.
Reducing risk
I would be remiss if I did not leave you with some tips for breast cancer risk reduction.
- Know your risk. Talk with a primary care provider. Or use an online calculator to get a rough idea.
- Watch your alcohol intake. While the American Cancer Society offers that there is no safe threshold for alcohol when it comes to cancer risk, if you drink, I suggest limiting it to no more than seven standard drinks weekly.
- Don’t use tobacco.
- Keep a healthy weight, especially if you are after menopause.
- Get some physical activity.
- If you are taking, or have been told to take, hormone replacement therapy or oral contraceptives (birth control pills), ask your doctor about the risks and find out if it is right for you.
- Breastfeed your children, if possible.
Thank you for reading “Revolutionizing Breast Cancer Survival: How Screening and Treatments Slashed Mortality.”
