Breast cancer in young women

Women who suffer from breast cancer at a young age are more prone to long-term physical and emotional side effects than older patients. A new research shows that ten years after being diagnosed with the disease, older women report fewer problems and require less care than their younger counterparts. Researchers from the Comprehensive Cancer Centre South in Eindhoven conducted a study on 183 breast cancer survivors and found that 44 per cent of older women complained of side effects compared with 71 percent of younger survivors, regardless of the amount of chemotherapy they had received. In another survey, only 4 per cent of the women over 50 years of age when diagnosed for fatigue reported it ten years later whereas among the younger women, 22 per cent had problems with tiredness later. Dutch researchers assume that this is most likely to be related to the fact that women over 50 are near to the end of their working lives, with more time to spend on themselves and on maintaining their family relationships. They are also less likely to have continuing childcare responsibilities
The survey clearly indicates that there is a strong need for specialist programmes for young breast cancer survivors. Nowadays all kinds of care programmes exist to deal with the physical and emotional problems associated with a new diagnosis of breast cancer. It is important that same kind of facilities should be available to breast cancer survivors, who despite being free of disease, can still suffer greatly with both physical and psychological problems.

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