I wanted to do this article because when a patient is newly diagnosed with breast cancer, there's a lot of information to process, and it's difficult to understand all of your treatment options in a single visit with your physician, so I wanted to provide our resources for my patients to watch at home that just reviews basic information about breast cancer and an over view of breast cancer treatment.The webinar will just go over basic principles, so it will not be personalized to your case. However, I do feel it's a good tool to gain a better understanding of the disease to become more familiar with your treatment options and ultimately feel more empowered to make the correct treatment decisions that are right for you. breast cancer is very common,but not all breast cancer is the same. So,there are three subtypes of breast cancer: estrogen receptor positive, HER2 positive, and triple negative.
Now, the secancers are very similar in that the yarise in the breast. However, they behave very differently, and thus we treat them differently. So, your treatment plan will be personalized, and it is very likely that you may know someone else who has been diagnosed with breast cancer, you may be familiar with their treatment plan and experience. However, understand that your treatment plan may look very different from theirs, and it will be personalized based on the biology of your cancer, or the breast cancer that you have, whether it's spread outside of the breast, and other factors that are specific to your situation. The other thing to keep in mind is that most women have excellent long-term prognosis,and thus, we never want the treatment to be worse than the disease.
Today, we are doing more and more targeted therapy, and that means we use drugs and surgeries that are effective for your specific cancer, and we're able to avoid medications and surgery that you don't need. And finally,treating your cancer will take a team of doctors. So, often, the first doctor you'll meet will be a breast surgeon like myself. However, a medical on cytologist will be part of your your care, and sometimes a radiation oncologist as well as a plastic surgeon, and we'll describe their respective roles as we get going.So, how common is breast cancer?
This is a graph of the breast cancer incidence in the United States between 1975 and 2015.You can see that between 1980 and 2000,there was a huge increase in rates of breast cancer. This corresponds to when we were using routine screening mammogram,so we were detecting more cancers simply because we were looking for them, but if you look over the last 15 years, there's been a high but relatively stable incidence, and we estimate that 1 in 8 women in the US will experience abreast cancer diagnosis at some point in her life. And in 2020, we'll see 276,000 new breast cancer cases in the US in women,and we'll see 2,700 new cases in men. Now,despite the high incidence over the sametime period, we see that the death rates related to breast cancer have significantly declined. We've seen a 40%decrease in mortality related to breast cancer since 1990, and this is related to detecting breast cancer at earlier stages as well as more effective treatment strategies, so fortunately, most breast cancer that we see today is very treatable, and if you look at women diagnosed with breast cancer between 2009 and 2015, at 5 years, there was a90% survival.
And if the disease was localized to the breast only, there was anear 99% survival at 5 years. Your specific prognosis will depend on, again,your stage at diagnosis and the biology of your tumor, which we will cover in detail. So, "Why did I get my breast cancer?"This is the question that everyone wants answered, and most of the time, the answer is that we don't know exactly why you developed breast cancer. We do know that there are risk factors that increase your chances of getting a breast cancer, one being family history, especially multiple family members on the same side.
We've also identified genetic mutations, in genes that are passed down from your parents that are significantly associated with breast cancer, the most common of these are BR CA 1 and BR CA 2,but this only explains 5% to 10%of the breast cancer cases that we see. We also consider hormone factors,and this is total lifetime exposure to estrogen, so the more estrogen over along time period that you're exposed to,that will increase your risk of getting breast cancer. There's other things that I've listed here, but still, the number 1 and number 2 risk factor for getting the breast cancer is simply being female and getting older. And 85% of the patients that are diagnosed with breast cancer will have no family history of breast cancer and no major identifiable risk factor, so while we can't tell you exactly why your cancer developed, we I think it will be important to review the basic principles behind a cancer development and the difference between how a normal cell behaves and how a cancer cell behaves. So,this is a normal anatomy of the female breast, and you can see it's a fatty gland that sits on top of the chest muscle, and if you look at it in cross-section, the yellow area--this isfatty tissue and support tissue of the breast--and the major structures are these lobules and ducts.So, the lobules are the balloon-like structures here. Their job is to make milk, and then the milk is carried out through ducts out the nipple, and we call those the milk ducts.
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