SHARJAH: A visiting oncologist and breast cancer survivor from the US said young women must immediately go for the ultrasound when they feel lumps on their breasts.
“It would be the ultrasound for them,” University of California (San Francisco)-Invest Therapeutics associate director and Early Phase Clinical Trials director Dr Pamela Munster told The Gulf Today on Tuesday.
An advocate of wellness through nutritious diet and ample exercise, who also encourages the cancer-stricken to be the promoters of the necessary support groups, gave the advice, when asked of her opinion as to what could be the other tool to help diagnose the probability of breast cancer among women below 40.
This is so since mammogramme is effective only for women above 45.
Last June, the UAE’s Friends of Cancer Patients secretary general Dr Sawsan Al Mahdi said the group is still lobbying about the need for new protocols and guidelines for early detection of breast cancer.
The lobby was a consequence of the findings of world health experts that were published in October 2011 that patients are now much younger.
In an October 2011 interview Al Mahdi said the institutions involved in the decision for the new protocols and guidelines are the World Health Organisation and the Union for International Cancer Control.
In a September 2006 interview, Welcare Hospitals’ Dr Rosalie Sant said: “Changing lifestyles and eating habits have resulted in the rise of diabetes, obesity and breast cancer in the UAE with the local women more than 50 years of age found to be at risk, and the number of such women has increased dramatically.
“The number of affected Westerners is tapering off and Asian women are at risk, specifically Indians and the Filipinas are the younger victims, even less than 30 years of age.”
Interviewed in November 2006, the first Emirati breast cancer surgeon Dr Houriya Kasim said that while at that time, it had been observed that the disease had become a major cause of mortality worldwide with one million new cases each year detected in this part of the world, we have noticed that the afflicted are now much younger than before.”
A Filipina mother from Sharjah shared that an ultrasound of her 22-year-old daughter in Philippines several months back revealed a “benign condition,” and it spared the family from a possible tragedy.
Meanwhile, on Thursday evening the “Dubai Goes Pink” campaign of the Breast Cancer Arabia (BCA) free interactive portal was scheduled to be launched with the Burj Al Arab illuminating a pink ribbon.
BCA founder Elizabeth Reyes who was behind the attempt to make the largest human pink ribbon from the UAE to the Guinness Book of World Records last year, said the campaign will continually inform the public that there is an online support system, able to give them “high quality information about breast cancer and its treatment and where to get this treatment.”
