What Everyone Should Know About Breast Cancer

BREAST CANCER FACTS

• More than 240,000 women and 1,000 men are diagnosed with breast cancer in the U.S. each year.
• One person is diagnosed approximately every 3 minutes, and one person dies of breast cancer approximately every 14 minutes.
• People over the age of 50 account for 76% of breast cancer cases, while only 5% of breast cancer diagnoses are in people under the age of 40 and 18% are in their 40s.
• More than 40,000 women and 400 men die each year from the disease.
• There are more than 2 million breast cancer survivors in the United States.
• The majority of breast cancers found today are “hormone receptor positive,” and excellent treatments exist. Nearly 1 out of 5 breast cancers diagnosed will be HER2-positive breast cancer, a form that tends to grow and spread more aggressively than other breast cancer.

MORE FACTS

• 43% of breast cancer patients skip treatments because they can’t afford them.
• 5 African American women die needlessly from breast cancer every day because they do not have access to care.
• Government-backed breast cancer screening supports only 20%, or 1 in 5, eligible low-income women.
• Only 26% of uninsured women over the age of 40 had a mammogram within the past year, compared to 56% of insured women. This means that more uninsured women risk a late-stage diagnosis and worse outcomes.