Being Aware of Breast Cancer Risk Factors

Breast cancer risk factors are lifestyles, habits, or personal traits that make it more likely that a particular person will have breast cancer. If one knows about the breast cancer risk factors, it may be possible for one to have some control over whether one develops the disease.

There are breast cancer risk factors that people cannot change. Women are more likely to have breast cancer than men. This may seem obvious, but men can have breast cancer. They have it less because their breasts are not constantly affected by levels of estrogen and progesterone hormones.

Age is one of the important age risk factors. As women get older, they have a much higher chance of having breast cancer than they would have when they were younger.

Some women are taking drastic measures because of their breast cancer risk factors. If they discover that they have certain types of mutations in the genes of their DNA, they will sometimes get a preemptive mastectomy to take these breast cancer risk factors out of their lives.

Two breast cancer risk factors involve history. One is the person’s family history. Having a mother or a sister with breast cancer makes the person more likely to get the disease. Personal history is also in play, because a woman is more likely to have a new breast cancer once she has had a first one.

Race is one of the breast cancer risk factors that certain women have to accept. White women will have breast cancer more often than African-American women, but the African-American women have a higher incidence of death related to breast cancer. Women of Asian, Native-American, and Hispanic descent are less likely of dying of breast cancer, or indeed having it in the first place.

Women have little or no control over some of the other breast cancer risk factors either. For example, if a woman started having periods at an early age and went through menopause at a late one, she is more likely to have cancer. It seems that the more periods a woman has had, the more likely she is to have breast cancer.

At the same time, there are breast cancer risk factors a woman can change. She might decide to have multiple pregnancies and/or breastfeed her infants for one to two years. Both of these actions can reduce the incidence of breast cancer.

Women also are able to choose whether or not to go on hormone replacement therapy at the time of menopause. One of the breast cancer risk factors that they can control is whether to take combined hormone therapy, which is a known risk factor for breast cancer.

Other breast cancer risk factors are alcohol, obesity, and physical activity. Drinking alcohol or being obese makes a woman’s risk go up. Physical activity brings the risk down. It is good to be educated on breast cancer risk factors.