Risk Factors You Can Control

Many factors might affect your risk for breast cancer and other diseases. You may be able to control and modify some of these, including:

• what you eat,
• how much you weigh, and maintaining a healthy weight,
• how much you exercise,
• whether you smoke,
• whether you drink alcohol and if so, how much and how frequently,
• the types of chemicals in your environment, and
• whether you took hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopausal

Symptoms for five years or longer

Making these changes in your life can be quite difficult. But it becomes easier to make these changes when you understand each factor, the importance of the changes, and practical ways to make the changes. And when it comes to the factors that can't be controlled, we'll help you work around them

Risk Factors You Can't Control

Some of the factors that increase your risk for getting breast cancer are things you can't control:

Age: Just as with many other diseases, the chance of getting breast cancer goes up as you get older. Your average risk of getting breast cancer over your lifetime is 1 in 7, assuming you live to age 90. But each 20 or so years of your life is associated with a different level of risk:

• From birth to age 39, your risk is 1 in 229.
• From age 40 to 59, your risk is 1 in 24.
• From age 60 to 79, your risk is 1 in 13.

The 1 in 7 statistic comes from averaging all the different risk levels. So the overall risk will always be higher than the risk associated with any one age bracket.