If a person has family members with breast cancer, especially a mother or a sister, it greatly increases a woman's odds of being diagnosed. Additionally, women who have their first child before the age of twenty years old are less likely to have breast cancer than women who were over thirty years old at the time of their first child's birth or had no children at all. If a woman breast fed her babies, her risk goes down as well. The chances become higher for a woman the earlier she began menstruating during adolescence. Women of higher economic status, living in a more urban environment in the northern United States, and who are married have the highest rates of breast cancer.
Statistics show how countries around the world have rather different rates of breast cancer.
From 1986 to 1988 the death rates of breast cancer victims were compiled. England and Wales had the highest rate with 29.3 deaths per 100,000 women with breast cancer. Other European countries tended to have the highest rates, and Asian countries had the lowest. Thailand had the lowest number of deaths with only one death per 100,000 women from 1986 to 1988. The United States ranked sixteenth of the fifty countries in the survey with a rate of 22.4 deaths per 100,000 women.