During the past few decades, across the world, breast cancer has emerged to be one of the top cancer killers amongst women. Last year, one million new cases were diagnosed and more than five hundred thousand lives were claimed by breast cancer globally. For a long time, USA has had the worst breast cancer mortality statistic in the world but for the first time, last year in 2008, India surpassed USA with more than fifty thousand mortalities due to breast cancer. WHO forecasts that by 2020, 70% of all breast-cancer cases worldwide will be in developing countries.

In South Africa, India and China, a little over 5% of cancers are caught in the earliest phase of the disease, Stage 0 or 1; in the USA, that figure is 50%. Most concerning is the spread of breast cancer in asian world including India and China, where breast cancer is rapidly emerging in younger, pre-menopausal women.

• In India, the average age of breast cancer patients range from 44.2 years to 49.6 years of age. Breast cancer occurs a decade earlier in Indian women when compared to the western statistics. (Source: Ref 1b)
• Young age has been associated with larger tumor size, higher number of metastatic lymph nodes, poorer tumor grade, low rates of hormone receptor-positive status, earlier and more frequent loco-regional recurrences and poorer overall survival.
• Almost all young (under 40 years of age) breast cancer patients self-detect their disease at a stage when it presents with a palpable lump, local skin or chest wall changes or distant metastases. This is also the case in US, UK, China, Middle East and Brazil.
• In India, 6,000 radiologists serve a general population of 1.3B people Vs. In USA, 27,000 radiologists serve a general population of 300M. (Source: National Professional Association for Radiologists and the Indian Radiology & Imaging Association (IRIA))
• There is no effective breast cancer screening tool for women 40 and under.

In USA, women under 50 years of age contribute towards 20% of all breast cancers where as in countries like India and China, women under 50 years of age contribute towards 50% of all breast cancers! (Source: National Cancer Institute USA, American Cancer Society USA, Breast Care 2008;3:21–27, Breast Cancer Care in India: The Current Scenario and the Challenges for the Future)

In 2003, a revealing article by The Young Survival Coalition (NY, USA) which interviewed 2,006 women younger than 40 years of age and diagnosed with breast cancer showed the following:

• 93% of breast cancers were at or beyond Stage 1 with at least one axillary lymph node involved in 41% of the 2,006 women
• 70% of breast cancers were larger than 2cm in size
• 83% of cancers were self-found by the women, all by themselves

In 2007, TIME magazine took notice of this emerging epidemic and published a global cover page article discussing the onset of breast cancer in young women. TIME discovered that breast cancers found in young women (under 50 years of age) are more aggressive and less receptive to treatment. TIME also noted that, “Asian women tend to have denser breast tissue than other women, and many studies show dense tissue is up to five times as likely to develop malignancies. What’s more, such tissue can conceal the disease since both tumors and healthy tissue may show up white on a mammogram.”. Please view the article in its entirety here: The Changing Face of Breast Cancer, TIME magazine, 2007

Worldwide Breast Cancer Incidence Rates (click on the image above to view a larger map).