Talk:Breast cancer

I've merged Inflammatory Breast Cancer which also needed a rewrite, into this article. So all the related dodgy bits are here together for your editing pleasure. -- Pete Bevin 12 Apr 2005

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This article badly needs a rewrite, and some of these "risk factors" seem really dodgy, at least the way they're explained.

They may sound dodgy, but those (early menarche, late menopause, late childbirth, late first child, hormone replacement) are well established factors that increase risk of developing breast cancer. Alex.tan 07:21, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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"Overall, it has been estimated that women have about a 1 in 10 lifetime risk of developing breast cancer."

I do not understand this 1 in 10 lifetime risk. Does it not contradict these stats from http://www.breastcancer.org/cmn_who_indrisk.html

• From birth to age 39, 1 woman in 231 will get breast cancer (<0.5% risk).
• From ages 40?59, the chance is 1 in 25 (4% risk).
• From ages 60?79, the chance is 1 in 15 (nearly 7%).

I am not very good with stats so I won't dare edit.

Well, if you sum up those odds, you get a total of a bit more than 10% for the lifetime risk for a woman aged 79. That isn't too far from 10% given that not all women live to that age. Therefore, there is no contradiction. Alex.tan 17:26, 25 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Nope, I am sorry but you can not add percentages up. In fact you can intuitively see that the odds will never go above 7% on an average. The odds for someone 79 years old are already given: 7%, they won't be more then that. In fact these stats make more sense with risk against age - Hence I EDIT. I add I am not good with stats but the change is more clarifying. ank 06:12, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I think you should go read up your mathematics book again. The same article you quote says - "The chance of getting breast cancer over the course of an entire lifetime, assuming you live to age 90, is one in 8, with an overall lifetime risk of 12.5%." - which means, obviously, that the overall lifetime risk is 12.5%. How much more intuitive can you get than that? Alex.tan 06:54, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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does someone want to do a writeup on breast cancer screening, mammography, epidemiology, etc. for this? Alex.tan 07:27 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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- "More than 99% of cases occur in women, but men can also develop breast cancer (the relative risk of developing breast cancer in a female versus a male is more than 100" - isn't this just saying the same thing twice?

- "Breast cancer can be detected by a woman when washing, by her partner during foreplay" - is this serious? I can't tell. Maybe a rewording is in order.

GGano 23:15, 29 Sep 2003 (UTC)

"More than 99% of cases occur in women, but men can also develop breast cancer (the relative risk of developing breast cancer in a female versus a male is more than 100" - isn't this just saying the same thing twice?

No, not exactly. It would be saying the same thing twice given the assumption that there are exactly equal numbers of males and females and that they both have the same life expectancies. It's a given that this is pretty much what actually happens usually but it's not always the case. --Alex.tan 02:36, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Inflammatory breast cancer

Pete attempted to merge the inflammatory breast cancer article, but ended up pasting its whole content. I reverted; while this info certainly belongs in this article, it should be interwoven with the regular breast cancer information. Staging, for example, is no different. JFW | T@lk 23:58, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Staging systems

The clinical TNM staging system is listed here. But operative treatment, adjuvant therapy and prognosis depend on the pathological tumor staging (pTNM). This differs from the clinical TNM system in the N (node) category. To avoid confusion with the rather complicated definitions of clinical and pathological TNM, I would suggest that only stage groups are listed, like here: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/cancer/breast/bcancer.test.stage.htm 00:27, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

No need to keep removing link to the "Keeping Abreast" news blog!

InvictaHOG has repeatedly removed an external link, and I have repeatedly added it back, to Keeping Abreast: Dedicated to providing only the most interesting Breast Cancer News links and sumaries. There is no good reason for removing it. This is a legitimate news blog and is quite helpful. It was very helpful to my wife, and many of the breast cancer patients and survivors she interacts with on her BC forums have commented on its quality and relevance.

InvictaHOG initially removed the link with the comment "First page of blog link has article about the mistletoe cure. I'd rather not have this here." That is not only terribly biased, it is reactionary. Yes, that article appeared as the most current post (top of the page) -- on Christmas Day, which added somewhat of a "cute" flavor to it -- but it linked to a legitimate news story, not to some website that offered weird alternative cures or something. Had InvictaHOG read the article, s/he would have seen that. And had InvictaHOG actually looked through a fair sampling of the other news items on the front page and in the archives, s/he would have seen that that article was not in any way common for this blog.

I am adding the link back now, and InvictaHOG will need to provide a reasoned explanation here to convince me not to do so again.

InvictaHOG, I do appreciate your vast contributions to Wikipedia. That is not somehing I can claim for myself. But I think you are being very unreasonable, reactionary, and biased here. - TaintedAzure — Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.243.210.226 (talk • contribs)

There is an ongoing debate about whether or not blogs should be included in the external link section; see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Clinical_medicine. In general, the onus is on the editor to prove that a particular blog is noteworthy. Andrew73 20:03, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm not doing this to be spiteful or mean. There are literally hundreds of breast cancer websites out there that people find helpful or interesting. Keeping Abreast is not particularly well-done or insightful. Yes, I did read through the article and I have seen many other popular press articles this holiday season touting mistletoe cures for many other diseases, none with evidence. I read other, better articles on the site but feel that as a whole it was not compelling. I am a relative inclusionist, but it not reactionary to see that not every blog or website needs or deserves to be linked here. This article would benefit from more attention, but not more links. A hundred more well-intentioned links (I know that your goal is to make the article better!) will not make this article more encyclopedic. I hope that you see my side of this! InvictaHOG 23:56, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

I understand your concerns, InvictaHOG, and I understand the concerns about blogs in the discussion Andre73 pointed to. There certainly are hundreds of sites about Breast Cancer out there, and the article wouldn't benefit from links to all of them. To be honest, I'm waffling on this after reading both of your comments, but I still am leaning toward this blog's inclusion, and here is why:

Breast Cancer patients will turn to Wikipedia for information about Breast Cancer. The article itself is very useful and very well written as a beginning educational resource. However, there are a couple of other types of resources breast cancer patients look for, and they do not know where to find them, or even to look for them. For instance, many breast cancer patients would love to find local support groups where they can get together with other patients and survivors. To my knowledge, there is no online resource that attempts to pull info on such local support groups together. However, patients and survivors also benefit from active online forums -- my wife has benefited beyond description from interacting with her "breast friends" at Healing Well's Breast Cancer forum, for example.

And another type of resource sought after by both patients and survivors alike is news related to the disease. "News," of course, can mean a whole lot of things. Most of the sites that pull together breast cancer "news" articles are either very popular-level (with the effect that they can mislead a seeker), are extremely biased in what they report (with the effect that they exclude some important or relevant information because it doesn't promote their agenda), or overly scholarly (with the effect that they are too difficult or inaccessible to the average patient). Yet someone who is dealing with cancer will want to be able to keep up with the goings on in breast cancer oncology. They'll want to know about research that is being conducted, clinical trials that are available, new medicines and procedures that are or may soon be available, old methods that are being supplanted by new ones, and a broad range of other "news" items. The Keeping Abreast news blog seems to do just that. Better than any I've yet found, it links to articles that touch the typical patient where s/he is. It claims to link to the "most interesting" news items, which appears to mean most interesting to the patient. Not all of the links are medical in nature -- it occasionally reports on "social" issues such as the controversy over whether European governments would provide Herceptin to survivors. The blog does not attempt to report news, just alert those interested to new items available elsewhere in a timely fashion. Nor does the blog appear to link to commercial interests. Basically, I'm saying what I already said -- it seems to meet typical breast cancer patients at the right level and with the right topics. It certainly does not attempt to provide much useful to the clinician or scientist in the field.

Does this sort of think belong in Wikipedia? I believe so. The encyclopedia article portion is not the place to include cutting edge or controversial or societal or "news" issues. Rather, it is a place to provide long-established knowledge about Breast Cancer. But in my mind, Wikipedia as a resource benefits greatly from also providing carefully selected external links to other types or resources (such as news) that are tangential to its purpose. -- TaintedAzure

How about linking to a link directory like http://dmoz.org/Health/Conditions_and_Diseases/Cancer/Breast/ instead? It has lots of links to good websites, support organisations and also personal blogs. --WS 15:22, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Nice resource, but it isn't a source for news. It serves a different purpose than Keeping Abreast. --TaintedAzure

male breast cancer

Does anyone know if the ICD-10 code C50 includes both female and male breast cancers? (unsigned comment, 1/3/2005)

Yes. Per this source, under "Differences in ICD-10 neoplasm codes and/or how they are applied", item #4 is "Breast cancer: (C500 - C509) ICD-10 codes for breast cancer are not gender specific." --Arcadian 14:07, 3 January 2006 (UTC)