Breast Cancer

There are several things that can lower your risk of breast cancer:

Limit the Amount of Alcohol You Drink

For breast cancer, there is no safe limit for drinking alcohol. Even drinking small amounts of alcohol can raise your risk. Compared with no drinks a day, each daily alcoholic drink raises your risk of getting breast cancer by almost 10%. 

Maintain a Healthy Weight

If you are not at a healthy weight, losing even a small amount of weight can help lower the risk to your health. Small changes in your diet and physical activity may be enough to help you become healthier.

Stay Active

Being physically active can improve your health, well-being and quality of life, and lower your risk of cancer.

Being “active” does not mean just formal exercise programs — lots of everyday activities, such as gardening, housework, walking to work or the store, or dancing, also count. Being active may also help you to reach and keep a healthy weight.

Talk to Your Doctor About the Benefits and Risks of Birth Control Pills and Hormone Replacement Therapy

If you have taken birth control pills, you may have a higher risk of breast cancer than a person who has never taken them. When you stop taking birth control pills, your risk of breast cancer starts to go down.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may be used to treat the symptoms of menopause, like hot flashes. Taking HRT may raise your risk of breast cancer, especially if you take the type that contains both estrogen and progesterone for a long time. Your risk quickly falls after you stop taking HRT.

Be sure to speak with your doctor or nurse practitioner before making any medication changes.

Learn About the Effects of Pregnancy and Breastfeeding

Being pregnant and giving birth, especially earlier in life, may lower your risk of getting breast cancer. Breastfeeding, particularly for 1 year or more over the course of a lifetime, may also lower your breast cancer risk.

Cancer screening is testing done on people who may be at risk of getting cancer, but who have no symptoms and generally feel fine. Cancer screening tests are not meant to diagnose cancer. Instead, they help find out which people are more likely to have cancer or get cancer in the future.

Getting screened regularly for breast cancer can find cancer earlier, which means that:

• the chance of dying from breast cancer may be lower
• treatment may have a better chance of working
• fewer treatments may be needed and the treatments may be less invasive (or easier to handle)

Who Should Get Screened

• If you are age 40 to 49, the Ontario Breast Screening Program encourages you to talk with your family doctor, your nurse practitioner or a Health811 navigator to make an informed decision about whether breast cancer screening is right for you. Most people in your age group who decide to get screened for breast cancer should get screened with mammography every 2 years.
• If you are age 50 to 74, the Ontario Breast Screening Program recommends that most people in your age group get screened every 2 years with mammography.

If you are age 30 to 69 and meet the eligibility criteria for the High Risk Ontario Breast Screening Program, the program recommends that you get screened every year with both mammography and breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (or screening breast ultrasound if MRI is not medically appropriate).

For more information about breast cancer screening in Ontario, go to the Screening for Breast Cancer page.

How to Book a Screening Appointment

If you are 40 to 74 years old, you can make your own appointment for a mammogram:

• Call an Ontario Breast Screening Program location directly or call our Appointment Booking Line at 1-800-668-9304.
• To find locations, accessibility information, hours of operation, contact information and mammogram appointment wait times, visit Ontario Health – Wait Times

If you are 30 to 69 years old and think you may be at high risk of getting breast cancer, you should visit your family doctor. They can send you for a genetic assessment or for screening based on your family and personal history.

For more details on genetic testing, visit the Canadian Cancer Society. 

During diagnosis, a person may need many tests to confirm the cancer. Waiting for test results to come back can be stressful. If you are waiting for a diagnosis, talk to your doctor or nurse practitioner about managing stress during this difficult time.

For information about diagnostic tests for breast cancer, visit the Canadian Cancer Society.

Starting the Diagnostic Process

Not every patient follows the same diagnostic process. Some people may be helped through the process by their family doctor, while others may be helped by a specialist, the Ontario Breast Screening Program or a Diagnostic Assessment Program (DAP).

In many cases, a family doctor is the first contact in the process of diagnosing cancer, and is the one to refer a patient to a specialist or Diagnostic Assessment Program.

Treatment for breast cancer will depend on:

• the type of cancer 
• the stage of cancer
• which treatments the person chooses to have 

Treatments may include:

• surgery
• drug therapy (chemotherapy) 
• radiation therapy
• other treatment options
• clinical drug trials

To learn more about types of breast cancer treatment, visit the Canadian Cancer Society.

Drug Therapy Information

You can learn more about specific cancer drugs using our patient information sheets. These provide information about cancer drug therapies, including what they are used for and how to manage side effects. To find patient information sheets, go to the Drugs page.

You can also see About Chemotherapy for general information about cancer drug therapy.

Quitting Smoking Can Help Your Treatment

It’s never too late to quit smoking. Whether you are scheduled to have surgery, radiation treatment or chemotherapy, quitting smoking can help your treatment work better. It also can reduce the chance of your cancer coming back or getting another form of cancer. For more information and resources, see Benefits of Quitting Smoking for People with Cancer.

Managing Symptoms and Side Effects

People with cancer may have symptoms related to their cancer or as a side effect of treatment. 

Our symptom management guides explain:

• how to recognize symptoms
• what to do and what not to do 
• when to contact your healthcare team

The guides are available for patients and for healthcare providers. Each patient guide also comes with links to helpful resources like courses, books, videos and worksheets.

Our side effect information sheets offer tips for people who have side effects from chemotherapy treatment.

If you are a person with cancer, please remember that it’s important to discuss any symptoms or concerns with your healthcare team.

• View Symptom and Side Effect Management

Clinical Trials

Clinical trials are scientific studies that test the safety and effectiveness of a medical treatment. Find clinical trials in Canada.

• Canadian Cancer Trials
• Clinicaltrials.gov

Palliative Care

Palliative care supports people with life-threatening illness and their families. The goal of this care is to relieve suffering so people can have the best possible quality of life. Palliative care should start when a person is diagnosed with a serious illness.

To learn more, go to the Palliative Care page.

When treatment ends, a person moves into a new phase of their cancer experience. For many patients, a lot of the after-treatment care will be given by healthcare providers in the community, like a family doctor or nurse practitioner.

Follow-Up Care

Follow-up care is the care given after active treatment for breast cancer is over. It focuses on:

• helping the person recover from the cancer and treatments
• finding cancer early if it comes back

Follow-up care can also involve Breast Reconstruction Surgery.

To learn more about follow-up care, visit the Canadian Cancer Society.

Managing Ongoing Symptoms

A person may have symptoms from cancer for months or years after treatment has ended. These are called long-term effects or late effects.

If you have ongoing symptoms after being treated for cancer, you can find information on how to manage them in our Symptom and Side Effect Management guides.

End-of-Life Care

Each person has a different experience during their final months and days of life. Their symptoms may change as their illness continues, and their needs for information and support will be unique. Family members will also have questions, concerns and needs of their own.

If you are helping a family member through their final months of life, talk to your healthcare team about your questions and concerns as they come up. They can give you information and resources to support you and your family, and help you make decisions and plan for end-of-life care.

For more information, go to the Palliative Care page.

Facts

In this section, the use of binary gendered language reflects how this data was reported by the source.

• Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Ontario women.
• One in 9 women will get breast cancer in their lifetime. Breast cancer has one of the highest survival rates of all cancer types in Ontario.
• The chance of getting breast cancer increases with age. In Ontario, breast cancer usually develops later in life, with 9 out of 10 breast cancers being found in people over age 40.
• In 2024, about 13,039 Ontario women will get breast cancer and about 3,500 will die from it.
• Only 5% to 10% of women with breast cancer have a family history of the disease.
• Fewer than 1 out of 100 women are at high risk of getting breast cancer.
• Some research shows that the chances of getting breast cancer or dying from breast cancer can vary for people of different races and ethnicities. For more information on the effect of race and ethnicity in breast cancer screening see Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity in Breast Cancer.