Save Your Breasts

True that Angelina Jolie’s preventive mastectomy has taken breast cancer awareness up by quite a few notches, but lack of knowledge about it is still significantly high in our country. Read on to know more and arm yourself up against this ailment.

- Saswati Sarkar

MUMBAI-BASED Anima* lost her mother to breast cancer at the age of 28, just two months before her marriage. “This not only changed me as a person, but also made a huge transformation in the way I look at health.” Anima got her first mamamogram done one year after her mom passed away. Now it has become her yearly routine. “This surveillance makes me feel secure,” adds the 40-year-old mother to Ayan*

Anima isn’t the only one to lose her mother to breast cancer. According to a study by an international consortium of researchers, coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, US, the death toll taken by breast cancer is the highest among cancer deaths in Indian women. “In our metro cities, the incidence of breast cancer is 30 in a lakh per year, while in the rural areas the figure is 8 in a lakh per year,” says Dr. Rajendra Badwe, Director, Tata Memorial, Mumbai.

But cancer is not an inevitability. Though you don’t have full control over it, your actions through the day—what you eat, whether or not you exercise, and avoid carcinogens—have some sort of an influence on the switches that turn on or off your cancer genes. Here is what you can do to slash your risk of breast cancer:

check your breasts