Despite decades of progress in education, detection, and treatment, breast cancer remains an ominous threat, both here and abroad. Breast cancer is the number-one cancer diagnosed in women worldwide and in the United States.
The U.S. has one of the highest breast cancer incidence rates in the world. About one out of every eight U.S. women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, the American Cancer Society estimates. The society projects about 311,000 new diagnoses of breast cancer among U.S. women this year and that about 42,250 women will die from the disease in 2024. And in recent years, breast cancer incidence rates in the U.S. have increased by 0.6% per year – and by 1% a year among women younger than 50.
To mark Women’s Equality Day on Aug. 26 – commemorating the 1920 adoption of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote – we turned to University of Colorado Cancer Center member Virginia F. Borges, MD, MMSc, a medical oncology professor in the CU Department of Medicine and a leading breast cancer researcher, to ask about breast cancer and what women should know about the threat. For 20 years, Borges has led the CU Cancer Center’s Young Women’s Breast Cancer Translational Program, a research team focused on why breast cancer in younger women and in the first 5 to 10 years after pregnancy often are more aggressive than other breast cancers.