Abstract

  Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women both in Low-and-Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) [1] like Nigeria, Pakistan [2] and India [3] and in High-Income Countries (HICs) [1]. These include Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Germany, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Sweden [4]. However, breast cancer-related mortality is high in LMICs [5,6] where the majority of the cases are diagnosed at the late stages of the disease [7]. Factors contributing to late diagnosis include lack of awareness about breast cancer, poverty, cultural and religious beliefs, misconceptions about the disease, fear of mastectomy, women’s lack of autonomy in health-related decision making [6], lack of adequate diagnosis, and treatment facilities [8]. Consequently, when diagnosed the disease is at the 3^rd or 4^th stage of cancer. Whereas, more than 90% of women are diagnosed early when they have a locoregional disease in HICs [6]. The early diagnosis of cancer, combined with an accessible, and affordable effective treatment, results in improvements in both the stage of cancer at presentation and mortality from cancer [9].

Keywords: Breast Cancer; Low-and-Middle-Income Countries (LMICs); High-Income Countries (HICs)

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Citation

Citation: Salma Amin Rattani. “Early Detection of Breast Cancer a Need in LMICs". Acta Scientific Women's Health 2.4 (2020): 27-29.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Salma Amin Rattani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.