Breast cancer survivors can safely conceive and enjoy motherhood without having an increased risk of disease recurrence provided they are under the care of specialists.
By Dr. Pankaj Kumar Garg
An oncologist needs to answer this question more frequently, especially in the recent times due to perhaps two major reasons – (a) a surge in the number of young women having breast cancer, and (2) a shift in the childbearing age due to multiple socio-economic and demographic reasons. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in India and globally – one in four Indian women diagnosed with cancer has a breast tumor.
As per an estimate, around 1.78 lac Indian women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020, and almost 90 thousand women died of breast cancer in the same year. There were estimated to be 4.5 lac breast cancer cases in India in 2020. Recent trends suggest that breast cancer is increasingly being observed in young women (
