breast cancer facts, brought to you by spencer trask & co

Breast Cancer Facts Brought to you by

Aside from lung cancer, breast cancer has the highest death rate among women.

Women have a 1 in 8 chance of

getting breast cancer while men have a 1 in 1,000

chance.

There have beenover 2.8 million women

diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States.

In the past 25 years,the mortality rate for breast cancer has decreased by 37%, avoiding

approximately 249,000 deaths.

79% of new cases of breast

cancer are in women over the

age of 50.

If a women has a close relative (mother, sister, or daughter) with breast cancer, their risk of getting breast cancer doubles.

It is estimated that

in the year 2016, there will be

246,660 new cases of breast cancer

diagnosed.

61 is the average age women in the United States are diagnosed

with breast cancer.

Approximately 11% of breast cancer diagnoses come from women under the

age of 45.

Approximately 85% of breast cancer cases happen when there is no prior family history of breast cancer.

If you already have been diagnosed with breast cancer, you are four times more likely to develop breast cancer again.

The chance of a woman dyingfrom breast cancer

is 1 in 36.

As of now there are approximately 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in

the United States.

Myriad Genetics was co-founded in 1991 by Doctors Mark Skolnick and Walter Gilbert, and entrepreneur and Spencer Trask & Co. Chairman, Kevin Kimberlin. It was the first company solely dedicated to finding disease-causing genome sequences. Since 1991, more than 1.5 million patients have already benefited from Myriad’s genetic testing. Their discovery of the breast cancer gene was a major breakthrough in the genome revolution, and the impetus for the Human Genome Project.  In conjunction with collaborators such as Dr. Skolnick and Dr. Walter Gilbert, Myriad scientists have gone on to discover several other important disease-causing genes, including:

BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer;

p16 cell cycle control gene that increases the risk of developing a variety of cancers, notably melanoma;

PTEN tumor suppressor gene that is involved in the development of many cancers;

ELAC2 prostate cancer gene.

Early detection saves lives. Talk with your doctor about what genetic testing can do for you.

Spencer Trask and Myriad Genetics