Stress and breast cancer are a deadly combination. The agony of having breast cancer has its toll on the sufferer’s mental health. The high level of stress, in turn, adversely affects the immune system, which then makes cancer worse.
If you want to know more about breast cancer for your own or others’ sake, then answers to the range of questions below can be helpful.
How common is breast cancer?
Next to cancer of the skin, breast cancer is the most common cancer among female Americans, with an average lifetime risk of 13%. Therefore, the chances that an American woman will develop breast cancer in her life is 1 in 8.
About 280,000 newly diagnosed cases of invasive breast cancer will occur by the end of 2020, with an additional approximately 50,000 new non-invasive (earliest form of) cancer cases.
The majority of cases of breast cancer occur 50-year-old women or older.
How deadly is breast cancer?
In the United States, breast cancer accounts for the second-largest number of cancer deaths in women. About 43,000 breast cancer deaths can occur in 2020, with the large majority of deaths (98%) occurring in women. The cause of these deaths is mainly metastatic breast cancer.