Lack of awareness about Breast cancer leads to its spread

One of the most widespread and talked about disease in today’s world is breast cancer. It is also the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women. Annually about 220,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer and more than 40,000 because of it. Although breast cancer in men is rare but an estimated 2,150 men get diagnosed with it and approximately 410 die of it annually. However, the good news is that these numbers are already on the decline and due to a lot of improvements in medical sciences and researches; many women have been saved till now.

A major contributing factor for the spread of this disease is the lack of knowledge among people. Lisa Ray, who battled and survived the cancer, recently said,” That’s one of the reasons that motivated me to talk about it openly because in India we still have this incredible fear factor around cancer.” Having complete knowledge about a disease helps anyone a great deal in keeping themselves from getting it. Due to the lack of awareness about the disease, a lot of myths have been generated. One of the most popular one is that a lump in the breast means that you have breast cancer. According to the National Breast Cancer organization, only a small portion of lumps found in the breast turn out to be cancerous.

The next widespread myth is that breast cancer is only limited to women. Although it is a small percentage as mentioned above, men can still get breast cancer. This lack of awareness is the main reason why there is a high rate of mortality among men. They too need to check under their nipples and areolas for lumps and visit the doctor in case of persisting lumps. Breast cancer is also considered to be passed on from parents to the children as a heritage. However, this is not the case as it has been found a lot of times that a person diagnosed with breast cancer is the first one in their family. The National Breast Cancer Organization has revealed that breast cancer was present in the families of only 10% women diagnosed with the illness.

A lot of people think that testing for breast cancer through mammograms is more likely to spread it as it emits very low radiation. But the benefits of the test outweighs the concerns. Therapies are not advised for all stages of breast cancer and even if you are advised for Radiation or chemotherapy, it won’t do much harm to you. Experts say that although Chemo and Radiation have potentially serious side effects, they are still life-saving treatments.

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