These days, there are more women in their 30s getting diagnosed with breast cancer in Chennai. This is really shocking and has been causing many to worry now. For a long, breast cancer has been considered as an older woman`s disease only.
It has been brought out by some oncologists that breast cancer in younger females would be tough to diagnose and treat as the cancer would be aggressive.
Over the last 15 years, there has been an overall increase of 7% in breast cancer in Chennai. This has been revealed by the data from the Madras Metropolitan Tumour Registry at Adyar based Cancer Institute. From the data it was clear that there was 1.5% annual increase in the incidence of breast cancer among women between 25 and 40 years of age.
More than a decade back, breast cancer overtook cervical cancer as the number one cancer in India women. Mr. R. Swaminathan, head of biostatistics epidemiology at Adyar Cancer Institute, spoke about how there has been an increase in cancer among every age group now. Point is that from 23.6lakh women in 2002, the number of breast cancer cases has doubled to 48.6 per one lakh woman in 2017. It must be taken into account that in 2022 the incidences of breast cancer were 52 per lakh women.
It was later brought to light by some oncologists at Taramani based Apollo Proton Cancer Centre that about a quarter of women diagnosed with breast cancer in the last 5 years were below the age of 40.