Cancer. The big C word. The big, bad wolf of medical ailments. The boogie man of bodily problems.
Cancer is scary in and of itself. But what is scarier is that more and more people are being diagnosed with cancer. They say if you either know someone who has cancer or will know someone who has cancer in your lifetime. What is scariest is that person might be you.
I thought I would never encounter this haunted disease, but then it hit my family hard. My grandma was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She was a lucky one that was given a high percentage chance to beat the nasty disease, and so far she has held to that.
But for many cancer ruins and changes lives. And there is one cancer that is considered one of the scariest. Ovarian cancer may not get as much attention as breast cancer but it is the most fatal cancer to affect women. Why? The symptoms are like a whisper, often explained as other things. While breast cancer is often detected when a woman finds a lump in her breast, ovarian cancer is usually caught long after the cancer has nestled its way deep into the tissue, too deep for traditional cancer fighting actions to make any difference.
With that sad thought in your mind, don’t fret. The numbers for ovarian cancer are decreasing, and an article from September 2011 issue of the new magazine called “Health Magazine” is telling us why.
Deaths associated with the disease are decreasing simply because fewer women are even getting the nasty cancer. (Yay!) The magazine conjectures that fewer women are getting the disease because they are on the Pill (birth control taken by mouth that releases hormones to keep a woman from ovulating. This is often to prevent pregnancy, but the hormones can have other positive and negative affects as well). “The fewer times a woman ovulated over a lifetime, the lower her risk of ovarian cancer,” states the mag.
But birth control is not the only savior in the case of ovarian cancer. Surgeons are actually operating smarter and better. You would think that after paying a pretty penny into your Cigna health insurance that you would be able to get the best surgery possible. But when technology was not up to snuff, this was not always possible. While we do not have a cure for cancer yet, the technology to treat and fight cancer is more advanced, allowing doctors to fully penetrate the site of the cancer to zap it out.
Other non surgical treatments have improved as well. The “Health Magazine” states that chemotherapy treatments have improved. One size does not fit all and chemo now can be administered in many different ways, which increases the likelihood of survival.
And finally, more people are educated about the disease. While ovarian cancer is not common enough that you will need a yearly screening, people who have a history of the disease in their family are getting screened because they are most susceptible.