The Frightening Facts About Breast Cancer Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women in the United States.
Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for African-American women.
One in eight women will get breast cancer in her lifetime, up from one in twenty in 1960. If these numbers continue to increase at their current rate, by the year 2000 at least one in every seven women can expect to get breast cancer. Breast cancer is more than 15 percent of all cancers diagnosed annually but it gets only about 6 percent of the National Cancer Institute's budget. Worldwide trends indicate the mortality rate of breast cancer to be epidemic. In 1980, an estimated 560,000 women worldwide died of breast cancer making it one of the main causes of premature loss of life in women throughout the developed world.