Putting the Risk of Breast Cancer in Perspective

Abstract
Educating the public about the risk of breast cancer promises to contribute to the prevention or early detection of the disease. Data on the risk of breast cancer are widely available to physicians and the public. However, for this information to be interpretable, it should be presented in a form that enables the risk to be understood in context. This is rarely the case, because of the difficulties involved in conveying such inherently complex information to a population and to individual women.Several studies have shown that women tend to overestimate their risk of breast cancer and that many fail . . .