Sustained lower rates of breast cancer in the United States

Excerpt

We have previously reported that, a sharp decrease in breast cancer incidence rates had occurred in 2003 among women ≥50 years of age in the United States [1]. This decrease seemed temporally related to a decrease in the use of hormone replacement therapy. In this update (Fig. 1) we report that, this decrease has been maintained into 2005. Comparing incidence from years 2000 through 2002 to years 2003 through 2005 significant decreases of 12.0% (se 0.8) and 7.8% (se 1.0) are seen for women 50–69 and >70 years of age, respectively. No significant decrease occurred in women less than 50. This reanalysis using the most recently released data from SEER [2] shows that, the decrease occurred primarily in ER positive breast cancers, with the rate of ER positive breast cancer in women 50–69 years of age decreasing 14.5% and ER negative breast cancers decreasing 2.1%.

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