Breast Cancer Cases To Increase 50% By 2030. Don’t Panic. 

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute project say that the number of breast cancer cases will rise 50% to 441,000 cases a year, according to research presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Sound awful? Maybe less so than you think. The increase was driven by three factors, according to Philip S. Rosenberg, PhD, a senior investigator in the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the lead investigator on the study.

• People are living longer. The older women get without dying of something else, the more likely they are to develop breast cancer.
• The baby boom. There are also more women who are at an age where they are at higher risk for breast cancer, so they’re more likely to get cancer.
• Rising rates: There are rising rates of a type of breast cancer called estrogen receptor positive breast cancer. The study projects these forward, which helps lead to the big jump in the number of cases.

Of the three, only the last is really a surprise. (It’s also good news that estrogen receptor negative breast cancer rates are actually going down.) It may be caused by changes in lifestyle and diet that increase risk of the disease; this study, which extrapolates from current disease rates, just can’t answer that question.

Another factor: a lot of the cases in Rosenberg’s presentation – about half the increase – is in what is called carcinoma in situ. These are smaller, earlier cancers, and some experts argue that they shouldn’t be considered cancers at all. They may be found by earlier detection, and some researchers worry that there’s actually overtreatment – that women are getting treated for in situ tumors that would not have grown or done them any harm.

So there are a huge number of issues we will have to deal with due to this increase in cases – but it’s hardly the epidemic it sounds like at first glance.

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Source: Forbes Health