Every two years, the American Cancer Society publishes a new report on breast cancer trends. The latest report came out earlier this month.
What does the new report tell us? Are we really making a great deal of progress against breast cancer as some of the media stories are presenting it? Or is progress more incremental in nature?
And how might we respond in a way that could make a difference–during this month of October and during the rest of the year as well?
In this post, I’m taking up a summer blogging challenge posed by Nancy at Nancy’s Point to answer ten random questions about cancer that she has put together.
Nancy has shared her answers to the ten questions, and asked other bloggers and readers to join in and answer as many as they like. It sounds like a great opportunity for all of who read or write blogs to get to know each other a little better!
So, here are my answers to Nancy’s ten random questions about cancer. Continue reading
It’s October, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month in now well underway. As always during October, we’re surrounded by pink products, business promotions displaying the pink ribbon and pink-themed advertising–all in the name of breast cancer “awareness”. But how much real awareness does all this bring? Does it actually help patients at all?
Why not take a step back from all the craziness for a moment and take a look at where we actually are in the fight against breast cancer. Breast Cancer Awareness Month has been around for 30 years. It seems fair to ask: with all this awareness, how much progress have we actually made against breast cancer? And if it’s not enough: how can we, or will we, do better? Continue reading
When we look at the progress that has been made against breast cancer over the last twenty years, an essential measure is mortality, how many lives are actually being saved.
The big picture story is that mortality from breast cancer for the U.S. population as a whole has declined somewhat, but not nearly as much as might have been expected given the emphasis on screening over the last twenty years.
But looking deeper reveals an even more disturbing story. Continue reading
Each year during the month of October we are more than ever bombarded with the pink ribbon. But what really is the purpose of all this “awareness” today–beyond selling pink-ribboned products?
Breast cancer screening through mammography has now become widespread, but misperceptions about the disease are also widespread.
How do we get to a more informed level of awareness–the kind of awareness that may better lead to the steps that need to be taken today to end deaths from this disease?
It was in the early 1990’s that I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
It also happened to be around that time that breast cancer advocacy and awareness efforts were starting to gain momentum.
We hear a lot these days about advances in the understanding of cancer biology, and about new experimental therapies.
But I sometimes find myself wondering just how much has been accomplished since the early ’90s. This post takes a look back at how far we’ve actually come in the fight against breast cancer in the past twenty years.
Last Tuesday, May 8, was a beautiful spring day in Washington, DC. I spent the day with many other advocates on Capitol Hill visiting our representatives in Congress to ask for their support on two important initiatives in the fight against breast cancer. One initiative is 2015 funding for the innovative Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program. The other is a new initiative that would not involve any increase in research funding, but would leverage exiting resources and technologies to move us more quickly towards the ultimate goal of knowing how to end deaths from breast cancer.
Another major study on breast cancer screening was published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). This study follows a report two months ago on the results of a large clinical trial on mammography conducted in Canada.
A summary of the Canadian trial’s main findings and links to several commentaries about it are in my recent post on top cancer research stories.
The study reported last week in JAMA did not include any new trial findings or other new evidence. Instead, it was a thorough review of what we know about the benefits and harms of mammography from the many trials and other studies that have been conducted over the last 50 years and an effort to distill from all this information what the current state of knowledge is about mammography. Continue reading
I recently came across a copy of a letter I wrote back in 1994, about a year after my breast cancer diagnosis, to members of a congressional committee that was considering the budget for the following year. Here is part of what I had written:
I was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 1993 at age 35, although I was considered to be at low risk for getting the disease…I read with great interest that researchers are finding some promising new leads in their study of this and other types of cancer. Discovery of the causes of and cure for cancer may not be far way, but it all depends on our continued strong commitment to providing appropriate levels of funding for basic research.
The paragraph above still represents essentially where we are today, twenty years later. That is, we continue to hear about promising new leads yet we still know little about the causes of cancer and certainly don’t have a cure. Continue reading
