It’s the first day of October, which is time for us to say goodbye to September and welcome Breast Cancer Awareness Month !
Image source: Medium
In light of this awareness month, we are going to have a series of breast cancer articles. We hope you all have learnt more about the different types of blood cancer (such as lymphoma, leukaemia and myeloma) in the past Blood Cancer Awareness Month.
What is the breast made of?
Before diving deeper into what is breast cancer, let us first have a better understanding of what our breasts are made of.
Image source: CDC
The 3 main parts of our breasts:
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Fatty Tissue. Fills up space and is the factor that determines the size of your breast. 1
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Lobules. There are 12 to 20 lobes in a healthy female breast, while each of them is made up of smaller lobules, which are glands that produce milk. 2
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Milk Ducts. Milk produced by nursing women is delivered to the nipple by these thin tubes. 1
What is breast cancer?
When abnormal or damaged cells that should have been programmed to death start to multiply and grow, tumors are formed. If the tumor is cancerous, cancer will then develop in that specific individual. 3
Breast cancer develops when the cell division process of cells in our breasts start to go wrong and get uncontrollable. These cancerous cells might start to metastasize (spread) to other parts of our body through the blood and lymph vessels. 4
Image source: National Breast Cancer Foundation
The lobules and milk ducts are where most breast cancers begin to form, where 85% of cases arise from the ducts and 15% arise from the lobules. At the early stages of breast cancer, when the metastasis process has not begun, the treatment for it is much more effective. According to the World Health Organization, if breast cancer is detected early, the survival rate can be as high as 90% or more with the help of therapy. 5
According to the Pharmaceutical Association of Malaysia, the most common cancer diagnosed among women in Malaysia is breast cancer. 6 In fact, one in every 20 Malaysian women are at risk of developing breast cancer in their lives. 7 Although so, breast cancer does not only affect women but also men, it’s just that it’s not that common. 8
Next week, we will be talking about some of the risk factors and symptoms of breast cancer. Stay tuned and see you in our next article!
A word from DOC2US
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Cover image credit: Canva
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