Word: breasts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What happened? Where have all the flowers gone? Whither the revolution? Is it all just fern bars and stock options, breast implants and cappuccino frappes from here till eternity? Well, it's kind of like your parents (whom, thankfully, you did not kill, despite Jerry Rubin's urgings) tried to tell you: if you weren't so damned self-absorbed, you might learn something...
Sometimes I think we all need to take a course in statistics before ever setting foot in a doctor's office. Case in point: the Food and Drug Administration's decision last week to approve the use of a breast-cancer drug called tamoxifen for women who don't have the disease but are at high risk of developing it. The FDA was swayed by the results of a study, made public by the National Cancer Institute last April, that showed that tamoxifen reduces by 45% these women's risk of developing breast cancer...
With a computer, of course. The NCI has developed a program that enables a woman, in conjunction with her health-care provider, to calculate her own risk of developing breast cancer by answering a series of questions about her medical and family history. You can order the program, which is formatted on a regular 3 1/2-in. floppy disc (available for Windows or Mac), free at cancertrials.nci.nih.gov or by calling 800-4-CANCER. You'll probably have to wait a few weeks to receive it, since the NCI has already mailed out most of the copies it had on hand. Zeneca...
There are five major pieces of information you have to supply. The first is your age, which turns out to be one of the most important risk factors. (In the U.S., the annual incidence of breast cancer in women 80 to 85 years old is 15 times as high as that in women 30 to 34 years old.) That is followed by your age at first menstruation, age when you delivered your first child, number of breast biopsies and family history of breast cancer. The program does not work for women who have already had breast cancer; doctors for years...
...have a lump in your breast, it needs to be evaluated," she said. "Nobody can tell by a [physical] examination that a lump is not breast cancer...