Cancer: The Facts

Did you know that one in three of us will be diagnosed with cancer during our lifetime? This disease tends to affect older people but it can stirike at any time. Many young women in their 40's are diagnosed with breast cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer, and colon cancer. We have known quite a few friends and relatives who have received this diagnosis. When you are that young, you don't expect to just go in for routine testing for these things. Mammograms, for instance are usually recommended for over age 50 women but now it is starting younger and that is a good thing. There is so much skin cancer too now. They say there were more than 270,000 new cases of the disease in 2001 and that is excluding certain skin cancers. But it is increasing about 1 percent a year. Breast cancer is becoming more common whereas lung cancer is dropping due to the drop in the number of smokers.