Breast Cancer Risk Factors

Medical experts are exerting all efforts in an attempt to illustrate every risk factor that increases someone’s chances of getting breast cancer. Each risk factor is generally discovered by taking a population of about 1,000 individuals or more, identifying their various features, checking who suffers from the disease, and then recognizing the relationship between their common features and the disease. However, breast cancer risk factors hold no concrete proofs of contributing to the probability of afflicting a person with the disease.

The risk factors for breast cancer can be divided into 2 main categories: those that are controllable, and those that are not. The breast cancer risk factors that people can control include the following: hormone replacement therapy (HRT), quality of lifestyle, and the type of environment.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been found out to increase one’s breast cancer risk. However, experts also revealed that termination of the therapy will bring back a woman’s level of risk to the time when therapy has not been done.

Eating the wrong kinds of food and staying inactive are the risk factors of breast cancer that can be easily modified. Other aspects of a person’s lifestyle such as smoking, alcohol intake, and lack of sleep, are all associated with higher breast cancer risk.

Where you live, work, or spend most of your time in can affect your health. Environmental hazards and pollutants are breast cancer risk factors that some people pay little attention to, but they can actually do so much about.

Breast cancer risk factors which are totally unavoidable are: gender, age, family history, and reproductive history. Your being a woman is already a breast cancer risk in itself. Although this does not suggest that men are entirely free from getting this disease, women are a lot more prone to developing it than men are.

Age is another common risk factor. Most women who have breast cancer are those who are beyond 50 years old. Although, younger women may suffer from it before earlier in life, those who are older have greater chances of acquiring the disease.

Genetics may be the most blamed among all the breast cancer risk factors. But only a few people know that breast cancer cases due to inherited vulnerability is only about 5-10 percent.

Childless women and those who each gave birth to their first child after 30 years old are more likely to develop breast cancer. Those who gave birth at early on have reduced breast cancer risk.

There are other possible breast cancer risk factors that few people know about. For example, women who have had radiation therapies when they were younger are more prone to having breast cancer in the later part of their lives. Other breast-related diseases also contribute in the increased breast cancer risk.

A personal history of the disease also heightens a person’s breast cancer risk. A woman who used to suffer from breast cancer may not have fully gotten rid of it. There is a huge chance that breast cancer may reappear. Regardless if the cancer was removed in the benign stage, this still does not mean that you are immune from it. There is the possibility that the cancer cells may have spread and reached the lymph close to where they are. This also suggests that the cancer has the possibility of occurring in the other breast.

Since most of these breast cancer risk factors are merely observations through the different researches done, these are also considered as more suggestive than they are conclusive. But because we all like to live healthy, we don’t really want to compromise that by straying from what science has laid down for us.