AH1 – Breast cancer

HYPOSENS WHAT ABOUT SERIES - BREAST CANCER

Breast cancer involves the growth of malignant cells (cancer) in the tissues of the breast. One in eight women will be diagnosed with that disease in their lifetime, being breast cancer the most commonly diagnoses cancer in women, although it can also affect men it is a rare disease (less than 1% of all breast cancer). In women, it is the second leading cause of cancer death.

Causes of breast cancer are mainly due to a mixture of genetic and environmental conditions. Regarding the genetic causes, risk factors can be the gender, age, race, genetic own conditions or any other case in family history or genome changes in certain genes such as BRCA1 or BRCA2, density of the breast, etc. A key aspect also to consider is the menstrual and reproductive history: increase in the level of oestrogens, the primary female hormone, increases the risk for breast cancer. Therefore, pregnancy and breastfeeding decrease the risk while the birth control pills may raise it. Some environmental risk factors that could increase the probabilities would be exposition to chest radiation, overweight, poor diet, lack of activity or hormone replacement therapy among others.

However, the majority of the people who suffer from breast cancer have no connection to these risk factors and other people that do correlate with them will never develop the disease. Therefore, the development of novel systems such as that using the HypoSens technology, that can improve and expedite the diagnosis and prognosis of breast cancer will be crucial for serving better treatments to the patients.