How Can I Lower My Risk of Breast Cancer?

How Can I Lower My Risk of Breast Cancer? (1:01)

Maintaining a healthy weight and getting regular exercise can lower your risk for breast cancer. In this video, HealthMaker Laura Esserman, MD, director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, UCSF, also discusses therapies that can lower risk.

Read Transcript

So there's a lot of things that every person can do. So, keeping your body mass index 25 or less, it's good for your heart, it's good to prevent diabetes, and by the way it works to reduce cancer. So, that doesn't always do the trick, but that's a good thing to be starting to think about, exercises is another one of those things for all those reasons and it turns out they are all kind of work together.

So those are the other personal level other things that you need to be able to do. That being said, we also know that there are medicines like tamoxifen or veloxaphine or even exemestane. These are drugs depending on your age and what your situation is, they can reduce, the chance that you will get a hormone and positive breast cancer.

And there are predictable situations, where there are markers that show that we can reduce the risk maybe by 3/4.