Younger Women are being Diagnosed with Breast Cancer, Survival Rates Lower than for Older Women

An alarming number of younger women are being diagnosed with breast cancer.

And for Rebecca Johnson, who was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 27, she realized that this was becoming a trend for many young women in America.

"I really wondered," said Johnson, now 44 and the director of the Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology program at Seattle Children's Hospital. So she examined decades' worth of data from the National Cancer Institute and found that cases of younger women with advanced breast cancer have increased about 2% each year since the mid-1970s with no signs of stopping.

The results from Wednesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed suspicions of many oncologists who noticed a growing number of cancer spreading to the bones, brain or lungs of patients younger than 40.

Statistics show, according to The Los Angeles Times, that in 1976, 1.53 out of every 100,000 American women 25 to 39 years old were diagnosed with advanced breast cancer according to the study. However, by 2009 that number had jumped to 2.9 per 100,000 for the same age group.

The trend, which is still unexplained, has raised concern for future treatment of the disease, as survival rates for young women with metastatic breast cancer are much lower than for older women.

"An increasing number of young women in the United States will present with metastatic breast cancer in an age group that already has the worst prognosis, no recommended routine screening practice, the least health insurance, and the most potential years of life," Johnson and her coauthors wrote.

Many researchers believe the increase may be due to various lifestyle changes, including diet, exercise, obesity, earlier onset of menstruation, use of birth control, delayed pregnancy and other factors.

In the meantime, she said she hoped the study would alert young women to the risks of breast cancer.

"There's no evidence that 29-year-olds should go out and get mammograms or anything like that," Johnson said. "But if there's a take-home message, I would say that it would be awareness of the fact that breast cancer can happen even in young women and that it's important for both young women and their doctors to be aware of this."