her risk of breast cancer later in life.
.....It is very important, however, to stress that even if you do all the right things in life, cancer can still strike you because none of these strategies eliminate the cancer risk: they just lower the overall risk.
.....Then there’s breast self-examination, or BSE, which fell into disfavour after several studies 1) failed to find a benefit from doing BSE regularly, and 2) concluded that there may be significant downsides to BSE, including higher anxiety levels from doing BSE regularly – those women tend to pick up more incidental but always-worrisome lumps – as well as higher rates of needless biopsies (a biopsy may be “minor” surgery for the surgeon but it’s surgery nonetheless, and for a patient there is no such thing as “minor surgery”) to rule out cancer in women who detect lumps while doing BSE.
.....But the reality is that most women would love to be given reasons to do BSE because nearly everyone wants to do something for themselves, so it’s nice to report that in one small recent study, young women at high risk for breast cancer got a significant benefit from doing regular breast self-examination: they picked up smaller cancers more effectively and earlier even than sophisticated tests did.
.....Now, this was a small study in a special group of young, high-risk women, so we don’t really know if a large group of women at average risk could garner the same benefit, but at the very least it shows that BSE, taught properly and done properly, can have a benefit for some women, so if you’ve stopped doing BSE because of all that previous negative publicity, you may want to re-discuss this issue with your health professional.
.....Now remind me, what did I have for breakfast? More important, did I actually eat breakfast? Well, no matter, I think I’ll eat anyway, just to be sure I’m full.
Dr. Art Hister can be heard on CKNW and other Corus Radio Network stations on House Calls on Saturdays at 10 AM, as well as seen on Global TV news on Saturday mornings at 9:20. |
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