posted on Jan, 18 2024 @ 07:53 PM
a reply to:
annonentity
From:
healthfeedback.org...
"Breast cancer cases haven’t doubled in U.S. women under 45, despite social media claims"
"A video that originated on TikTok and was widely shared on Facebook wrongly claimed that there was a spike in breast cancer cases in 2022. As this
review will explain, the video misrepresented the data, and the change in the figure from previous years was due to a different age range included.
The American Cancer Society (ACS) publishes a Cancer Facts & Figures report every year, which provides projections of the number of cancer cases and
deaths expected for the coming year. This differs from reports from organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which
gather the actual number of cases that occurred during past years.
The ACS reports don’t suggest that breast cancer cases have almost doubled.
The TikTok video focused on a table provided by the ACS that included the projected cases of female breast cancer for women under 45 in the U.S.
However, the video didn’t explain that this was a projected figure rather than actual cancer cases. It went on to highlight that the figures
produced by the ACS remained at approximately 26,500 cases each year between 2019-2021.
In 2022, the ACS replaced this table with one that provides data for cancer incidence in the under-50 age group. This projected 47,550 new breast
cancer cases in women under 50 and didn’t specify the projection just for under-45s. The TikTok video didn’t explain that the 2022 table is for a
different age range than the previous years and instead claimed that breast cancer cases have almost doubled.
The risk of breast cancer rises sharply with age, so the number of cases is expected to increase significantly when older age groups are also
included. Real-world national figures for 2022 aren’t yet available. However, the CDC reports that 99,131 women aged 45-49 were diagnosed with
breast cancer between 2016 and 2020, an average of 19,826 per year. If a similar number were used in ACS’s projections, it would account for almost
all of the difference caused by including this age group in the figures for their 2022 report."