spread (Heyman, Tyner, Phipps, Cave, and Owen, 1991, p. 35).
The American Cancer Society (1994, p. 5) estimates that approximately 145,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed each year as suffering from breast cancer. Further, each year between 40,000 and 45,000 American women may be expected to die from breast cancer (American Cancer Society, 1994, p. 6).
Mastectomies are performed on approximately one third of all women diagnosed as suffering from breast cancer (American Cancer Society, 1994, p. 8). All of these women will experience a change in body image, and approximately 60 percent of those women will experience a serious body image disturbance.
Most women who experience breast cancer are diagnosed with the condition between the ages of 50 years old and 60 years old (Curran, 1994, pp. 184 185). Thus, advancing age is one factor that places women at a greater level of risk for the development of breast cancer. A 40 year old woman has a one in 217 chance of developing breast cancer. The odds drop to one in 93 for a 45 year old woman, to one in 50 for a 50 year old woman, and one in 33 for a 55 year old woman. Heredity is also a factor in the development of breast cancer, although only 2.5 percent of breast cancer cases have been positively linked to heredity, and experts think that the total proportion to breast cancer cases related to heredity is less than 10 percent.
Breast cancer has also been found to be more prevalent in countries where high fat diets are common (Normandeau, 1988, p. 54). Japanese women who consume a low fat diet, as an example, have a lower breast cancer rate than do American women. Scientific research, however, has failed to establish a statistically significant link between diet and breast cancer. One link that has been established is that women living in economically developed countries are more likely to develop breast cancer than are women living in countries that are under...