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The Alarming Rise of Breast Cancer in Young Women
A dramatic increase leads to a simple question: Why?
From the year 2000 until around 2016, the incidence of breast cancer among young women — those under age 50, rose steadily, if slowly. And then, this happened.
I look at a lot of graphs in my line of work, and it’s not too often that one actually makes me say “what the hell” out loud. But this one did. Why are young women all of a sudden more likely to get breast cancer?
The graph comes from this paper, appearing in JAMA Network Open.
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis utilized SEER registries to conduct their analyses. SEER is a public database from the National Cancer Institute with coverage of 27% of the US population, and a long-track record of statistical backbone to translate the data from SEER to numbers that are representative of the population at large.
