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Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in women (after skin cancer). ¹

There are more than 2 million women living in the United States who have been diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer.²

• Although women do die from breast cancer, many more women live with it. Each year, about 211,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer. Around 40,000 die from the disease.³
• Of the 211,000 women who are diagnosed with cancer each year, 58,000 will have cancer that hasn't spread beyond the lining of the milk ducts of the breast. This is a very early type of cancer. It's called non-invasive or in situ This means that it has stayed in the spot where it started and hasn't spread further.
• Breast cancer does happen in men, but it's rare. The National Cancer Institute thinks that there are around 1,700 new cases of breast cancer in men every year.³

In the United States, breast cancer is diagnosed more often among non-Hispanic white women than among women from other racial or ethnic backgrounds. It is not clear why this is.⁴

The table below shows the number of women who were diagnosed with breast cancer for every 1,000 women in the same ethnic group in 2004.

It's a commonly quoted statistic that 1 in 8 women will get breast cancer. This statistic is accurate for a woman who is born today and lives to be 90. But it doesn't mean that every woman has a 1-in-8 chance of getting breast cancer. Your risk is unique. It depends on lots of things.

A more useful way to think about the general risk of getting breast cancer may be by age. The table below shows your chance of getting breast cancer at certain times in your life. For example, for an average 40-year-old woman, her risk of getting breast cancer in the next 10 years is less than 1 in 60.⁵