Oct 07
8
Breast Cancer Deaths Declining
Good news on the breast cancer front, or at least partially. Apparently deaths from breast cancer are on the decline, but one group of women who is not experiencing this positive downswing in deaths from the female-dominated disease are african american women. The death rates are falling at roughly a rate of two percent per year according to some statistics, and that is better than good – it’s great, considering that this number is huge in terms of preventing deaths, and also if you consider that this number is supposed to be incremental each year.
The speculation for this drop in death rates from breast cancer is that HRT, or Hormone Replacement Therapy was refrained from being recommended to women in premenopausal and menopausal periods as a way to replenish their estrogen supply, which was thought to be a major contributor to the formation and worsening of breast cancer to begin with. This is also being attributed to part of the reason that less deaths are being reported for this tricky cancer.Â
The news gets even better for women over the age of fifty years old, since their rates fell almost five percent over the past few years, and this makes me think that the HRT theory is all that much more potent in this case, since women in this age group are the ones that were most impacted by this hypothesis since they are the ones most often prescribed with Hormone Replacement Therapies.
One fact that didn’t quite make sense to me though was the fact that fewer women are reported to be getting early mammograms, so this would make one think it would be detrimental to the death rate from breast cancer, since early detection is the best defense against death from breast cancer since it can be nipped in the bud more easily if it’s caught early. At any rate, we won’t argue with statistics this good!Â
