Due to rampant change in lifestyle and behavioural shift, women staying in the urban areas have higher risk of suffering from breast cancer. According to the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC), an estimated 70,218 women died out of 1,44,937 patients diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, making it one death for every two new diagnoses.
Dr PK Das, Senior Consultant, Medical Oncologist, Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, said, “Age, sex, ethnicity and genetic predisposition are risk factors that are constant for all women across the world, but there is a group of modifiable risk factors whose ascendance is believed to have increased breast cancer in recent years. Diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease, rise in breast cancer in India can also be attributed to lifestyle factors that increase a woman’s risk of developing
the disease.”
“Studies have indicated that a woman who bears a child at an age of 20 has lower risk of breast cancer than a woman who bears her first child after 30. Similarly, higher the number of full-term pregnancies, the lesser is the risk,” said Dr Das.
