Lung cancer kills twice as many women every year as cancer of the breast. But breast cancer does kill more women age 35 to 54 than any other cause, and therein, lies one big reason why it's a woman's worst nightmare. The really compelling reason that people put breast cancer on a different scale is that everybody knows somebody with breast cancer. Since it is the leading killer of women in the 30 to 55 range, everybody has a tragic story, and the tragic story translates into a lot of fear. We do know that women tend to overestimate their risk.
Breast cancer is also a disease replete with mythology.
Although it gets a huge amount of media attention, a lot of what's widely circulated is wrong. The number of women diagnosed with breast cancer has been rising substantially each year, but the death rate has been steadily declining. Eighty-three percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer are alive after five years. That's compared to 64 percent in the 1960s. Only 5 to 10 percent of breast cancers are the result of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations in the genes.