The National Breast Cancer Centre has launched an interactive tool to enable women to calculate their risk of breast cancer. The online risk calculator is supported by information about risk factors for breast cancer and also provides useful information about lifestyle changes women may wish to make to reduce their risk.
The calculator asks a series of questions about a woman’s age, family history of breast and ovarian cancer, genetic factors, height, weight, alcohol intake, menstrual and reproductive history, and previous breast conditions to calculate her risk of developing breast cancer compared to another woman of her age.
It then informs women if they are at ‘low or average risk’, ‘moderately increased risk’ or ‘potentially high risk’ of developing breast cancer and provides details of what has contributed to this risk.
The risk calculator can be accessed at the National Breast Cancer Centre’s website www.nbcc.org.au. The calculator is part of a National Breast Cancer Centre mini-site about breast cancer risk factors that rates the importance of different risk factors, dispels the myths and clarifies the different ways risk can be explained.
