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Women urged to screen for breast cancer

With October being the breast cancer awareness month, women are being urged to present themselves for breast screening since they have a tendency to develop the disease at least a decade earlier than their Western counterparts.

“It is a known fact that early detection can save lives and help reduce the number of women who succumb to this disease,” said Dr Farida Al Khaja, Chairperson of the Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign at the Dubai Health Authority, while launching a five-day campaign at Dubai Hospital on Sunday.

“We want women to come forward and regularly screen themselves. The breast cancer tumour takes up to three years to become noticeable and by the time it is noticeable, the cancer reaches the second or third stage which means the patient will need aggressive form of treatment and chances of cure also reduce.”

A compilation study released recently recorded an extraordinary increase in the number of cancer cases in the UAE over the past 30 years, making it the third leading cause of death in the UAE following heart diseases and accidents.

The study was compiled by Shaikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum Award for Medical Sciences’ Centre for Arab Genomic Studies (CAGS), based on independent reports and statistics on cancer published since 1981.

It also pointed to the lack of national cancer survey programmes.

As per the study, a huge number of women suffered from various types of cancers with the highest being breast cancer at 9.7 per cent.

The first figure about cancers in the UAE appeared in 1981 with reference to five cases among 209 patients with liver diseases at Al Qassimi Hospital in Sharjah. Twenty years later, a report issued by the Dubai Health Authority indicated 1,379 cancer cases presented between 2004 and 2007. The study points to breast cancer as the most common malignancy among women in the UAE with a tendency to develop the disease at least a decade earlier than their counterparts in Western countries.

It also indicates that due to social customs, many UAE women do not present themselves for regular medical examination until the case becomes associated with remarkable pain in advanced stages of the disease.

Al Khaja said that according to the statistics from the cancer registry, 99 per cent diagnosed were women and 1 per cent were men. “The main average age of diagnosis was 48 years, but in most cases by the time the women approached the hospital, they were stage three or four cancer patients.”

“This is the scenario we want to avoid and therefore we are advocating the important of early detection.” She said that awareness is a very important aspect to educate women about the important of self-examinations and yearly screenings.

asmaalizain@khaleejtimes.com

• UAE