Breast cancer: definition, history, symptoms, causes, worldwide scenario, global statistics

Breast cancer is the abnormal growth of cells. Breast cancer is the major cause of death internationally and most commonly affects the female population across the globe. There are various diagnosis and treatment strategies available, including basic physical checkups, mammograms, CT scans, and other cellular and molecular techniques for screening, detection, and confirmation of breast cancer. Breast cancer is treated by surgical tumor removal, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and immunotherapy methods. All these methods have some advantages and disadvantages, and chemotherapy and radiation therapy induced severe side-effects. The best approach for breast cancer treatment is the early detection of the disease, and there are advanced methods or screening methods to detect breast cancer in its early stages that have been developed. In this chapter, we have discussed the definition, history, symptoms, causes, worldwide scenario of breast cancer, and breast cancer statistics globally in detail.