One in every 30 women in Indian metros will develop breast cancer as compared to one in 70 rural women. The disease claims 35,000 lives annually, up 18% from 1990, and experts predict the incidence of breast cancer is likely to double in the next 10 years.

While breast awareness has certainly grown in recent times, so, too, has fear of the disease. Misconceptions about breast cancer are common: Could that sexy underwire bra cause breast cancer? What about hormone therapy? Here, we dispel 11 common myths that contribute most to women's dread of the disease. Nothing short of a cure can put a happy face on this monster. Until then, knowledge is your best protection.

Myth 1: Wearing a bra or using antiperspirants and deodorants increases your risk of breast cancer.

These are two Internet rumors that never seem to quit. It's not true that wearing a bra, especially underwire bras, traps toxins by limiting lymph and bloodflow in your breasts, increasing risk. There's also no proof for the claims that antiperspirants and deodorants because cancer by keeping the body from sweating out the cancer-causing substances that build up in the breasts, or because they contain harmful chemicals that are absorbed through the skin.

Myth 2: If you have small breasts, you're much less likely to get breast cancer.

Size doesn't matter. Any woman with breasts can get it.

Myth 3: Eating high-fat foods and dairy products boosts your risk.

A number of studies have found that women who live in countries where diets tend to be lower in fat - for eg. Japan, China - have a lower risk of breast cancer. But the majority of studies focusing on women in the West haven't found a solid link between dietary fat consumption and breast cancer risk. Why are these findings contradictory? It may be that women in Japan are at lower risk for other reasons: They exercise more, eat less, weigh less, smoke less, or have a different genetic profile or environmental interaction that makes them less susceptible.

As for dairy products, the study results are mixed. But Harvard's Nurses' Health Study, a large-scale study of 120,000 women, recently found that premenopausal women who ate a lot of dairy products, especially low-fat and fat-free ones, ran a lower risk of breast cancer. The study found no link between dairy product consumption and breast cancer risk in women who are past menopause.

Myth 4: Breast cancer is an old woman's disease.

Cancer risk does increase with age, especially post menopause, but in U.S over 50% of breast cancer patients are below 50 years of age, and the cancer is usually detected between ages 40 and 50.

Myth 5: If a relative has had breast cancer, you're destined to get it, too.

Genes count - but there's a big difference between family history and strong family history. If your mother or sister had breast cancer, your risk is slightly higher than if a more distant family member, such as an aunt or a grandmother, had the disease. The more close relatives in your family who have had it, the higher are you’re risk. Don't just consider your mother's family history, either: You can also inherit breast cancer from your father's side.



Just as important is the age at diagnosis among the females in your family who've had the disease. Cancers that turn up before a woman enters menopause are more likely to be caused by genes that can be passed down than cancers that appear later in life. But if your mother gets breast cancer at age 70, there is only a very small risk that breast cancer runs in your family. Yet even if your mother and sister were both diagnosed in their 30s, your chance of getting the disease is still significantly less than 50 per cent.

If several women in your immediate family have been affected, you may want to talk with your doctor about genetic testing, to detect abnormalities in the so-called breast cancer genes BRCA 1 and BRCA 2. There are now tools available to help women who are at unusually high risk.

Myth 6: If there's no breast cancer in your family then you're not at risk for the disease.

Every woman is at risk for breast cancer. So are some men! As important as it is not to over-emphasize the risk conferred by heredity, it's just as important to recognize the sobering flip side: 70 per cent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have no family history of it. That's why it's important for all women to get screened regularly.

Myth 7: You need to examine your breasts monthly.

For years, experts championed the monthly breast self-exam (BSE). But when scientists recently put BSE to the test, they were surprised to discover that it didn't save lives and, in some cases, actually did more harm than good.

"BSEs are no better than regular poking around," says Susan Love, M.D., a surgical oncologist and author of Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book. "Most women find their own tumours, but not by doing BSE. It's in the shower, or you roll over in bed and feel it, or a mate finds it." In a Chinese study, women in the BSE group reported finding at least 15 per cent (or 114) of the tumours "accidentally" or "by themselves," not during a deliberate self- or clinical exam.

Myth 8: Mammograms protect you from the disease.

If you stop to think, the fallacy here is obvious: A mammogram is simply an X-ray of your breast. It can only spot the disease, not prevent it. But the procedure's role in the fight against breast cancer has invested it with an undeserved aura of power. Mammography is quite adept at detecting small, slow-growing malignancies, the type that would not put a woman's life in danger anyway. But it can't save the life of a woman who has the most insidious form of breast cancer, which will kill her regardless of how early it's detected.

Not all experts agree that mammograms make sense for women in their 40s, as the tests tend to be much more accurate in older women. After menopause, breast tissue becomes fatty and appears gray on a mammogram. Tumours look white, so they pop out against this background. Premenopausal women are more likely to have dense breast tissue, which shows up white on a mammogram, just like cancer. For this reason, Dr. Susan Love likens reading a younger woman's results to looking for a polar bear in a snowstorm. A 1999 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that mammograms miss as many as 40 per cent of invasive cancers in women younger than 50.

Experts now advise that women in their 40s should discuss the benefits and risks of mammograms with their doctors and make individual decisions about when to begin screening. Whatever your age, be aware that some tumours evade detection even under the best circumstances. For that reason, you cannot let a normal mammogram lull you into thinking you can ignore a suspicious lump. Many women find out they have breast cancer within months or even weeks after a negative reading.

Myth 9: Finding a lump or a spot on a mammogram means you have cancer.

Eight out of 10 lumps aren't cancer. More often, they're cysts or a reaction to normal hormonal fluctuations linked to your menstrual cycle, among other things. Likewise, a suspicious mammogram doesn't necessarily mean you're in trouble. A 1998 study estimated that nearly half of women without cancer will be sent for more tests after one of their first 10 mammograms, and 19 per cent will have biopsies. So don't panic if you feel a lump or are told your mammogram needs follow-up.

Myth 10: Breast cancer will kill you if you get it.

Recent improvements in five-year survival rates suggest that the odds of beating breast cancer are a whole lot better than in the old days. Breast cancers fall into three broad categories.

One type grows so slowly that it never becomes life- threatening. Cancer in your breast alone can't kill you. To do that, it has to spread. So a woman with a very lethargic form of the disease will die of something else long before the cancer has a chance to endanger her life.

Another variety becomes lethal over time but sometimes responds well to treatment if caught early.

A third type grows so aggressively that it causes irreparable harm no matter how small the tumour is when it's found.

Right now, doctors can't tell for sure which kind of cancer a woman has. Physicians try to guess the tumour's type by measuring its size, examining its cells under a microscope, and checking to see if it has spread to the lymph nodes. Because these methods not very accurate, they often end up overtreating people. Chemotherapy and hormone-like drugs reduce the chance of metastasis by about a third, but at least seven out of 10 women who receive these medicines would have survived without them.

But better ways of classifying different cancer types are in the offing. Hopefully, these techniques will let doctors reserve aggressive treatments for the women who really need them. For example, studies show a tumour's genetic signature predicts severity better than traditional markers such as cancer cells in the lymph nodes. The team of Dutch researchers has developed a method of evaluating a tumour's gene profile to anticipate how it will behave.

Myth 11: If you find out you have breast cancer, you need to act now.

"When you're first diagnosed, you completely panic. Your first reaction is, 'Cut it off.' All you want is your life back," Dr. Love says. "But your cancer has been there eight to 10 years by the time you can feel it or see it on a mammogram. You really do have time to catch your breath and find out what you need to know."

Most women who are diagnosed today can choose a breast-saving lumpectomy followed by radiation. Furthermore, many technical advances are reducing the side effects typically wrought by surgery. It used to be that you had to remove all the lymph nodes in the armpit to find out if the cancer had spread. Now many surgeons are doing sentinel-node biopsies, which only require one or two lymph nodes. Studies have already shown that works. It's also less apt to produce the painful swelling and other side effects that often follow traditional lymph node biopsies.

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