Regarding the Oct. 2 news article titled “Breast self-exams questioned.” I am a 12-year survivor of breast cancer. I found my own lump through self-examination when I was 42 years old. It never did appear on a mammogram, but when discovered, it had already spread to nearby lymph nodes (Stage 2). A good friend found her own lump through self-exam when she was 32 years old – too young for a mammogram by anyone’s guidelines. She is still alive and healthy 13 years later. How long do you think either of us might have survived if we had disregarded our own self-exams?
Self-exam should be considered “one leg of a three-legged stool”:
1. The average tumor doubles in size every 90 days. Without a monthly exam, a tumor can become quite large, and the cancer may spread by the time a woman has an annual mammogram.
2. An annual mammogram is critical because mammograms can often detect tumors as long as two years before they are large enough to be found by self-examination. However, mammograms miss as many as 15 percent of tumors, so the monthly vigilance of a self-exam is also critical.
3. An annual exam by a physician is important because the physician may detect something suspicious that requires a follow-up, and which might have been overlooked in the monthly self-exams or may not have appeared in an annual mammogram.
Breast self-exam is not difficult to learn nor difficult to perform. Neither I, nor my friend, nor the thousands of other women like us may represent a statistically significant reduction in mortality as a result of conducting our own self-exams. However, for each individual woman and her family, that “reduction” and continued health is significant indeed.
Edmonds
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