National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) is a prime opportunity to remind women to be breast aware for earlier detection. It call calls international attention by turning everything pink. Men wear pink shoe laces, women sport pink shirts, businesses everywhere hang pink ribbons and change their paper products into a pink color. Amazingly, Tokyo Tower even lights up pink during the month of October. And in observance of the breast cancer campaign, there will be walks and events taking place all in an effort to bring forth awareness of early detection and even prevention of breast cancer. This observance have played a major role in the reduction in breast cancer death rates in the United States.

Statistics show that breast cancer will strike well over 200 thousand women this year alone. It will also claim the lives of over 35 thousand women. According to the American Cancer Society statistics, breast cancer is the most common cancers among women accounting for nearly one in every three cancers diagnosed in American women. A woman's age is the single most important risk factor for developing breast cancer. Statistics show that a woman living in the United States has over a 12 percent chance or a one in eight chance, of developing breast cancer in her lifetime. For African American women, they are more likely to be diagnosed when they are older or at a later stage when the cancer is less treatable, leading to breast cancer death rates being 38 percent higher for black women. Overall, the chance that breast cancer will be responsible for a woman's death is about one in 35 according to the American Cancer Society, but thankfully the death rates have been declining since 1990 because of the heightened awareness with larger decreases in death in women being younger than age 50. The early detection awareness along with early treatment, as with any kind of cancer, is the best for treatment. Breast cancer that is detected at an early stage has a five year survival rate exceeding 95 percent.

The American Cancer Society recommends women over 20 years of age perform breast self examinations every month. Feel your breasts regularly. It is recommended that women between ages 20-39 should have a clinical breast exam every three years. Women over 40 should have a clinical breast exam and mammogram at least once a year. It is a fact that mammograms save women's lives which is evident by the more than 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the United States today. Unfortunately nearly 13 million American women over the age of 40 have never even had a mammogram. It is important to remember that mammograms are safe and effective tests to detect breast cancers that are too small to be felt in a physical examination.