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The Chronic Conditions: Breast Cancer and High Blood Pressure

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A few of the chronic health conditions that occur in my family are breast cancer and high blood pressure. My great grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer later in her life, this was a while ago so she did not receive the type of treatment needed. One reason being that in that time period you needed to catch it early on for them to do much with it, and the second reason being that she caught it too late. Breast Cancer is not something that she overcame, since her diagnosis no one else in the family has been diagnosed. My grandmother is getting close to the age where most women are diagnosed but it is not something that has occurred since then. High blood pressure, on the other hand, is something very common in my family. My dad, …show more content…

I still have more doctors appointments ahead of me to make sure that it is a benign tumor, meaning cancer less, and there will be further questions as to if this is something that could raise my chances of getting breast cancer in the future. I was reading an article titled "Breast Cancer: Predicting Individual Risk", it is written about a doctor at the mayo clinic in Rochester, MN. "He is widely regarded as the one of the international leaders in the genomics of breast cancer." He says, " Two women with the same high-risk mutation in a breast cancer gene- and thus the same sixty-five percent lifetime risk of breast cancer- could, in fact, have very different outcomes. Depending on how the other 20,000 odd-genes in her genome might be acting in the background, one woman may develop breast cancer at an earlier age, and the other might not even get it (p. 1-2)". He is studying to give women the best information on their genes as possible. Doctors are learning way more about this disease than other doctors in the past which is in return helping woman of all ethnicities with their road to recovery and healing processes. Young states, "According to the American Cancer Society about 230,500 women in the United States have been diagnosed with invasive breast cancer this year. Nearly 40,000 women are expected to die from this cancer this year. Only lung cancer causes more cancer deaths in women (Young, 2011, p. 1)". That is still a big number of women that do

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