Breast cancer affects one in eight women. Add life-saving early detection to your list of autumn traditions like pumpkins, harvest and football.

Your local health care team can help you prevent, detect and treat breast cancer. Among the best tools is a yearly mammogram for all women aged 40 and older.

Let’s remember the facts:

• Breast cancer is the most common non-skin cancer women face; around 240,000 cases will be found this year.

• One in three of all new cancers found are breast cancer.

• This year, more than 43,000 women will die from the disease; it’s second behind only lung cancer in deaths among women due to cancer.

• Early detection methods like mammograms have helped cut the rate of breast cancer deaths, which have declined more than 40% from 1989 to 2020.

How to ensure breast cancer takes fewer lives

If you haven’t scheduled your annual mammogram this year and you’re 40, do it today. Our facility offers 3-D mammography, the best tool for general breast cancer screening. If the exam shows something might be wrong, advanced imaging and diagnostic tools can ensure you get answers fast.

• Clinical breast exams as part of your yearly checkups are important, and so are regular breast self-exams. Know what to watch for:

• Breast lumps, especially ones that seems hard or don’t move around easily

• Itchiness, soreness or skin that’s warm

• Uneven differences between your breasts

• Bulges, ripples or dimples in your skin, or new changes to skin or nipples

• Any sort of discharge, especially if it contains blood

You should understand risk factors. One is family history.

Do you know if your mother, sister, aunts or grandmothers had breast cancer?

Breast density, alcohol use, activity level, exposure to radiation and other factors also shape your personal risk level.

Your primary care provider can help you review your health history and recommend steps if you’re at higher risk.

What happens if the result is positive?

If tests reveal you have breast cancer, your specialists will develop a treatment plan with you. Depending on the type of breast cancer and its stage, the plan will vary, but may include:

• Surgery: Lumpectomy is breast-conserving surgery to remove the cancer. Mastectomy is a procedure to remove the entire breast. Ultimately, these surgical decisions are up to you. Reconstructive surgeries can ensure you not only fight the illness, but that you feel like yourself after the fight.

• Intraoperative and Radiation Therapy: Today, surgeons can include radiation while they complete lumpectomy surgery to help prevent recurrence of cancer at the original site. Follow-up radiation therapy does the same thing, using pinpoint energy to destroy cancer cells while avoiding damage to other parts of your body.

• Chemotherapy and biotherapy: Using medications or a combination of meds and your body’s own immune system, cancer experts can help stop your cancer, all while letting you live the best life you can during this process.

• Precision Oncology: With this approach, cancer specialists look at your unique DNA and how it might help treat specific breast cancers.

You can fight breast cancer by supporting survivors and encouraging women you care about to get regular mammograms. Politely reminding them or volunteering to help so they can get this vital test completed are great ways to show how much you care this fall – and all year long.

— Debbie Streier is the regional president/CEO at Avera Marshall Regional Medical Center