I may have breast cancer
If you have received a positive or possible diagnosis of breast cancer, there are a number of questions that you can ask your doctor. The answers you receive to these questions should give you a better understanding of your specific diagnosis and the corresponding treatment. It is usually helpful to write your questions down before you meet with your health-care provider. This gives you the opportunity to ask all your questions in an organized fashion.
Breast Cancer Risk Factors
A “risk factor” is anything that increases your risk of developing breast cancer. Many of the most important risk factors for breast cancer are beyond your control, such as age, family history, and medical history. However, there are some risk factors you can control, such as weight, physical activity, and alcohol consumption.
Breast Cancer Risk and Risk Factors
By now you may be familiar with the statistic that says 1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer. Many people misinterpret this to mean that, on any given day, they and the women they know have a 1-in-8 risk of developing the disease. That’s simply not true.
colon cancer stages
Staging is the process of finding out how far the cancer has spread. This is very important because your treatment and the outlook for your recovery depend on the stage of your cancer. For early cancer, surgery may be all that is needed. For more advanced cancer, other treatments like chemotherapy or radiation therapy may be used.
Colorectal Cancer Screening Tests
Screening tests are used to look for disease in people who do not have any symptoms. In many cases, these tests can find colorectal cancers at an early stage and greatly improve the chances of successful treatment. Screening tests can also help prevent some cancers by allowing doctors to find and remove polyps that might become cancer. The tests used to screen for polyps and colorectal cancer can be divided into two broad groups:
Risk Factors for Colorectal Cancer
While we do not know the exact cause of most colorectal cancers, there are certain known risk factors. A risk factor is something that affects a person’s chance of getting a disease. Some risk factors, like smoking, can be controlled. Others, such as a person’s age, can’t be changed.
What Is Colorectal Cancer?
Colon and rectal cancers begin in the digestive system, also called the GI (gastrointestinal) system. This is where food is processed to create energy and rid the body of solid waste matter (stool). In order to understand colorectal cancer, it helps to know something about the structure of the digestive system and how it works.
Breast Cancer Stages
If you’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer, you will undergo a process known as staging to help determine how much the cancer has spread in your body.
Breast cancer staging helps your doctor determine the best treatment options for you. By categorizing breast cancer, both doctor and patient are better able to predict the most likely outcome of the disease and make treatment decisions based, in part, on that prognosis.
Alternative Breast Cancer Treatments
Women around the world are increasingly drawn to learning about alternative breast cancer treatment.
“At my practice of integrative oncology, one in four of the patients I see is a woman living with or beyond breast cancer,” says Donald Abrams, MD, professor of clinical medicine and director of clinical programs for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “A lot of patients are interested in these kinds of interventions.”
Breast Cancer Prevention and Early Detection
Early detection is key to successfully treating any form of cancer, and breast cancer is no different. But a good deal of breast cancer research now also focuses on prevention — ways to decrease your risk of ever getting breast cancer. The greatest advances in breast cancer prevention have been through the use of drugs that block the effects of estrogen on breast tissue. Estrogen is a female hormone that has been linked to some forms of breast cancer.
