Word: cancerously
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...While the risk factors for a disease may cross borders freely, the cultural understanding it takes to treat it doesn't. Americans may live in a world of pink ribbons and LIVESTRONG bracelets, but in other parts of the globe, breast cancer is still a shameful secret. Every three minutes an Egyptian woman is informed that she has the illness, and one of her first fears is that her husband will leave her. Secrecy leads not only to misery but also to misinformation. In India, women with breast cancer may be forced to use separate plates and spoons because...
...these local problems and beliefs mean that solutions will have to be similarly regionalized. "Physicians country by country will have to figure out how to beat this cancer," says Dr. Eric Winer, chief scientific adviser to Komen for the Cure. As a TIME investigation in North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East showed, there are places where those solutions are being found - and places where they aren't. There are countries in which lives are being saved - and others in which far too many are still being lost. In all of them, the first step...
...Ethnicity as Destiny Of all the things that can determine a woman's chances of surviving breast cancer, perhaps one of the most powerful is the simple matter of race. Most women in the U.S. are of European ancestry, and the majority of those who develop breast cancer are struck by a type that is partly stimulated by exposure to estrogen. This is one reason the disease usually hits in middle age, after 25 or so years of the monthly hormonal surges associated with ovulation and menstruation. Since the cancer relies on estrogen to grow, drugs like tamoxifen and Herceptin...
...Asian women, as well as black women in the U.S. and Africa, are at higher risk of developing a more aggressive form of breast cancer known as estrogen-receptor negative, or ER-negative. That illness strikes an average of 10 years earlier than the other variety and is indifferent to drugs that block estrogen since it isn't fed by estrogen in the first place. Worse, research findings released in June 2006 showed that 40% of premenopausal African-American breast-cancer patients have an even more dangerous form of ER-negative cancer called the basal-like subtype, resistant not only...
...Genes can cause problems of their own - particularly for Asians. Fewer than 10% of American women with breast cancer have a form caused by an inherited mutation in their genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2, which makes them three to seven times as likely to fall ill. BRCA-related breast cancer is more apt to hit before age 50 and to recur in the second breast. In a 2002 study, University of Toronto doctors concluded that because of the relatively early age of Asian breast-cancer patients and because hereditary cancers disproportionately occur in young women, "a high proportion of breast...