Despite being warned that they are at increased risk of getting breast cancer, young women who were treated with chest radiation (also known as mantle radiation) for a childhood cancer are not getting their mammograms as they should. Researchers estimate that 12 percent to 20 percent of women who received mantle radiation as girls will develop breast cancer, and some reports say that percentage is as high as 28 percent.
Experts now recommend that women who had a pediatric malignancy start getting mammograms at age 25, much sooner than the average population, who will start at age 40. This is because the risk of developing breast cancer has been shown to start increasing as early as 8 years after chest radiation was completed.
And yet studies have shown that 47.3 percent of the women between the ages of 25 and 39 who are in this high-risk population are failing to get mammograms.
So if you fall into this category of patients (or know someone else who does), please, please get your mammogram annually, starting right now. Young girls having chest radiation during the time their breasts were still developing have a significantly increased risk of those radiation treatments damaging the breast tissue in such a way that breast cancer will form.
It's unfortunate that once you have some type of cancer, you can't just check off the "Done with Cancer" box on your life chart and move on, free of worry. But that's not the case.