I am opening my new store soon, called - Healing Pink Ribbons - which will be dedicated to Breast Cancer Awareness.  I am a Breast Cancer Survivor, myself, and have dedicated my store to a dear friend's wife, who died in January, 2008 due to Breast Cancer. I am also a former Marriage and Family Therapist, with research expertise, as well as, experience coordinating a birth defect prevention grant.

One of the most prominent Breast Cancer Research Foundations is Dr. Susan Love's Research Foundation. Her book, Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, is probably the most widely read book by Breast Cancer victims and survivors, as well as, physicians.

According to The Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, which is a prominent research and educational institution for the prevention and understanding of Breast Cancer, there are some myths surrounding the issue of early detection.
The following material is taken directly, word by word, from Dr. Love's Research Foundation Website. You can find more information at the author's website.

Prevention Detection
What can I do to prevent breast cancer? What is the best way to find my cancer early, before it has spread? These are two of the most common questions women have. Here's what we know:

Breast Cancer Prevention
There is nothing that you can do to ensure that you absolutely do not get breast cancer. But there are some things that appear to help reduce breast cancer risk.

Breast Cancer Detection
For decades, women have heard that the best hope of curing breast cancer is finding it early. To that end, doctors have taught women about the importance of three breast cancer screening techniques: breast self-exam, clinical breast exam (a breast exam done by a health professional), and mammography. This emphasis on breast cancer screening has perpetuated the belief that all breast cancers can be cured if they are found early. It also leads people to believe that all women who survive breast cancer do so because their cancer was found early.

The latest research, however, indicates that neither of these beliefs appears to be true. It now looks like there are about six different types of breast cancer that vary in how aggressive they are. Some of them are so "good" that they will never metastasize (spread throughout the body). And that means it doesn't matter when you find them. They just don't have the ability to cause someone to die of breast cancer. Others are very "bad" and so aggressive that no matter when you find them—which means even if you find them when they are still very small—they have already begun to wreak havoc. These are the types of cancers that cause women to die of this disease. Still others, probably about 30 percent, have the potential to become "bad" if not stopped early. These are the cancers whose outcomes are affected by breast cancer screening programs and early detection. These are also the cancers mammography is best at finding.

So is the concept of "early detection" a total falsehood? Not really. There are some cancers that we truly can detect early. What is misleading is the idea that every cancer has the potential to be found early by our current techniques. Right now, unfortunately, we are limited by both our techniques and our understanding of breast cancer. Screening is still our best tool for changing the mortality rate of breast cancer. We need to take full advantage of it while working very hard to find something better.
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Risk Assessment

Another very important issue regarding Breast Cancer Awareness is the Assessment of Risk. Dr. Susan Love speaks to this directly on her Foundation Website:

Assessing Risk

Every woman wants to know what her risk of getting breast cancer is and what she can do about it.

The term "risk factor" refers to identifiable factors that make some people more susceptible than others to a particular disease. In breast cancer, we have come up with some risk factors.  But so far, there is nothing comparable to the connections found between smoking and lung cancer. In fact, 70 percent of breast cancer patients have none of the known risk factors.

Important Points

    * Risk factors don't necessarily increase in a simple arithmetic fashion: If one risk factor gives you a 20 percent risk of getting breast cancer, and another gives you a 10 percent chance, it doesn't always mean that now you're up to 30 percent. The interaction of risk factors is a tricky and complicated process.
    * The older you are, the higher your chances are of getting breast cancer. Most breast cancer occurs in women over 50—about 80 percent of cases. So whenever you look at risk factors, you need to correct for age. Other risk factors—family history, hormonal factors, etc.—will most likely cause breast cancer only in combination with rising age.
    * There is an impression that more young women are now getting breast cancer. That's partially true. The percentage of young women getting breast cancer hasn't changed. But the number of younger women in the country has increased. If you take 10 percent of 40, you get 4; if you take 10 percent of 400, you get 40. There are more 40-something women with breast cancer because there are more 40-something women around.
    * Risk factors vary by race/ethnicity.

Genetic Risk Factors
We divide breast cancer occurrences into three groupings. The first, and most common, is sporadic—that's the women with breast cancer who have no known family history of the disease. The second is genetic—there's one dominant cancer gene, and it's passed on to the succeeding generations. The third is polygenic, and it occurs when there is a family history of breast cancer that isn't directly passed on through each generation in one dominant gene—some members of the family will get it and others won't. Women in this category are at greater risk for cancer than the general public, though less so than women with hereditary cancer.

Dr. Susan Love goes into great detail about the high risk factors for Breast Cancer, but I believe it would be best to wait and talk about this in another guide.

Healing Pink Ribbons will be stocking inventory very soon.  Please come by and visit.

jedda.husky