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There's been an awful lot of back-and-forth.  Should women get mammograms?  Should they not?  Do mammograms really help?  Or are they just a waste of money? Now a new study has found that mammography has, indeed, led to fewer late-stage breast cancers, according to newswise.com. In the last 30 years, since mammography was introduced, late-stage breast cancer incidence has decreased by 37 percent, a new study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center finds. The analysis takes into account an observed underlying trend of increased breast cancer incidence present since the 1940s, a sort of inflation rate for breast cancer, the Web site reports. Researchers looked at early-stage and late-stage breast cancer diagnoses between 1977-1979, before mammography became popular, and compared it to diagnoses between 2007-2009. Based on trends observed in the pre-mammography period of the 1940s to the 1970s as well as continued trends over time, t...

Imagine this.  Instead of a painful mammogram or biopsy, some day soon doctors may be able to tell if you have breast cancer -- and its severity -- from your urine. According to newswise.com, a researcher at Missouri University of Science and Technology has devised a way to detect biomarkers that indicate breast cancer in urine even before a mammogram picks it up. An excessively high concentration of certain metabolites can indicate the presence of cancer, the story reports, all from a simple urinalysis. What really speaks to me is the possibility that this simple test could possibly figure out whether you have a cancer that needs to be treated right away, or one that is less aggressive and may need no treatment.  I was in that in-between box, and unfortunately, for right now, all potential cancers (like DCIS) are treated as though they truly are cancer because those of us with this cellular abnormality are at very high risk of developing invasive cancer. My case of DC...

Is it for you?  If you've just been diagnosed with breast cancer, are you going to opt for the "guaranteed" cure?  I say guaranteed because nothing, with cancer, is. But would you take the route Jolie did?  With an 87% chance of getting the disease, she made, I believe, the right decision.  More and more women are opting for this more drastic approach, even though researchers have found that lumpectomy is often just as effective. More women, also, are choosing to have both breasts removed, even if only one is cancerous.  I took this route.  At the time, I had a 5-year-old and I wanted to do anything I could to be around him.  Looking back, would I have made the same choice, after complications with reconstruction due to lumpectomy and radiation, the first time around? Probably, yes.  Cancer strikes such deep fear in all of us.  Even though two out of three people now survive cancer, I don't know anyone who doesn't immediately think abou...