Advances in Breast Cancer Screening: Precision, Imaging, and Harms

According to data from GLOBOCAN 2018, the incidence of new breast cancer cases continues to increase worldwide across all age groups. This trend is especially evident in Asian and African countries with rates of premenopausal breast cancer rising rapidly in India and conurbations of China. In Western countries such as North America, the United Kingdom (Fig. 1), Europe, and Australasia, age-specific breast cancer incidence steadily increases until the age of 70 years [1–4], while in Asia this peaks in the fifth or early sixth decade and then plateaus or gradually decreases. As previously alluded to, the proportion of premenopausal cases is relatively higher in Asian compared with Western countries where the majority of breast cancers occur in postmenopausal women and are hormone receptor positive [3–5]. For example, it has recently been estimated that one in nine women in Japan will develop breast cancer during their lifetime. When considering only premenopausal women, the frequency of breast cancer no longer differs significantly from incidence rates in Europe and the United States. Hence at the present time, it can be surmised that early detection of disease in premenopausal women has a relatively greater impact among Asian women. Nonetheless, it is also the case that the incidence of postmenopausal breast cancer is rising in many Asian countries such that the age-specific incidence patterns in Singapore now mirror those in Western countries. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that age-specific incidence in many other Asian countries will shift from a traditional Asian profile to Western incidence patterns in near future [4, 5].