Why do young females gets Breast Cancer, know from expert

Hello everyone, I’m doctor Nikhilesh Borkar. I’m a consultant surgical oncologist at Sir HN Reliance Hospital specialising mainly in Breast and Oncoplastic surgery and head and neck cancer surgery. Many times we are faced with the question as to why we are seeing more of young females under 50 years of age with breast cancer. Now if we go by the latest Lobocan data, if we review the 2018 twenty as well as 22 data, nowadays breast cancer is the most common cancer in India. Female, males all data combined. If we go for the female data, almost 24%. So around 1/4 of the cancers which female have will be breast cancer. Has this become common nowadays in India? There are two reasons for it. One is because of the westernized lifestyle. So we see more of sedentary lifestyle. The exercise amount that patients do is very less the unhealthy food habits where we have fast food joints and this leads to increased obesity. Now why does obesity lead to breast cancer? Everyone knows that around 4050% of the breast cancer have estrogen receptor positive and respond to estrogen which comes from the ovaries. Now how does obesity ’cause this? Apart from the ovaries producing estrogen, we have to be aware that even fat is responsible for manufacturing in estrogen or adrenal glands. Above the kidneys secrete anglostenidon, which to the fat and fat has an enzyme called as aromatase, which converts this enzyme to estrogen, which is the second source of estrogen in our body. So if we reduce the obesity, A theoretical possibility that almost 1/3 of the breast cancers will be preventable if everyone is having ideal body weight with just about 7% of fat, eats healthy food, does regular exercise, but that is just idealistic, it never happens. So that is one reason. Westernized lifestyle, Sedentary lifestyle. Now second reason is slightly complex. If we see the western population, the pyramid is triangular where the base is formed by the older population and the peak is formed by the younger population. Well if we see our Indian population, most of the population is concentrated in the center. So as we know that age wise the incidence of breast cancer increases. So per lakh incidence, if we look at it is still low. It is slightly higher than the western population but still it is quite low compared to the older population in India. But due to our instead of pyramid, we have a maximum population in the younger age group of 30 to 60. The population per say is so high that even if the incidence per lakh is less, we see more of young patients coming with breast cancer. And as we also know that compared to the West, we see the incidence of breast cancer in India which is almost a decade earlier. So these are the reasons why we see breast cancer slightly earlier in younger patients in the Indian scenario. Thank you.