Chances of getting cancer in healthy breast not removed?

 I do know that having the brca gene ups the chances considerably, I think it was something like 20% or higher chance of another breast cancer within 5 years, but since you are not brca, I am not sure of the chance. Sorry I am not more helpful! hopefully someone will have an answer for you.

Can the moderators perhaps weigh in here? It is a question I have wondered about myself.

My MO told me the chance is about 1% per year, so after 10 years, you will have a 10% chance of having cancer in the other breast.

I also had a UMX and I'm still considering having my "good" breast done when I do my reconstruction next year.  

My oncologist told me that my risk was about double that of the average woman my age.  I was diagnosed at 49 and the average 49 year has an 11% remaining lifetime risk, so that put my remaining lifetime risk at about 22%.  At 49, with 41 years till I reached 90 (my oncologist told me that most risk estimates these days go to age 90), that averaged to just over 0.5% per year.

Here's the important thing to understand.... your total risk goes down over time. If you don't get BC this year, you don't add this year's risk to next year's risk. Instead, you forget about this year's risk - it didn't happen so you don't have to worry about it anymore. It's a concept called "leaving risk behind".  The way to think of it is that you can't have an accident today for something you did yesterday.  So your risk level in your 40s is your risk level in your 40s, and once you reach your 50s, you no longer have to consider your risk from your 40s, you only have to be concerned about your risk level for being in your 50s.  The way this works is that for me, now being age 56, my remaining lifetime risk has dropped to about 18%. This is simply because I have fewer years left in my remaining lifetime (to age 90) and I've 'left behind' 7 years of risk.  

Another thing to understand is that risk increases for all women as we age.  So my average 0.5% risk per year is actually less than that each year when I'm younger, and more than that when I'm older.  The following article talks about breast cancer risk by age:

Probability of Breast Cancer in American Women

You can see that the average woman has a 1.45% chance of getting breast cancer during the 10 years of her 40s.  That's 0.145% per year, so for someone who's had BC, the risk might be closer to 0.29% per year.  Once this average woman is in her 60s, her 10 year risk is 3.45%, or 0.345% per year.  That would mean that someone who's had BC might have an annual risk of around 0.69%.

And this article talks about what contralateral mastectomies and what the contralateral risk really is for the average woman (i.e. someone who is not BRCA positive or doesn't have extraordinary risk factors):  Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy: What Do We Know and What Do Our Patients Know? 

Not sure of the percentages, but I had a mastectomy at age 46. Then 28 years later I discovered a lump in the other breast. The onc said it was a new primary; not a recurrence. This time I had a lumpectomy.  

There are a lot of factors that scew the stats given. For instance, did your menstrual cycles return after chemo and raise the chances of feeding a lingering er+ cancer cell? Were you lobular? (30% greater odds of developing in other breast), were you node positive? Etc. Etc.



4 years after my unilateral mastectomy I began having pain on the outer side of my left (non-cancer side) breast and arm pit area. I began to feel a jelly like ball in my arm pit and the pain didn't go away for 3 months so I went for a 3D ultrasound of the breast. A hypo echoic mass with angulated margins sand spiculations was found, about .9cm in size. I am having additional ultrasound imaging of it next Monday.



The surgeon asked me last week if I have considered a preventive MX on this side. I told him I have but am not ready to do that. He pointed out that all of this surveillance will not prevent cancer from occurring, which I guess I know in my mind, but always wanted to believe it wouldn't happen. Now I am scared and second guessing everything I chose 4 years ago.