Geriatric Care Management Blog

It's Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I had a question from one of my clients about why should she worry about breast cancer “at her age?”  We devote a lot of press to mothers and daughters and sisters and spouses, but what about grandmothers and great-grandmothers?  What I am going to share with you in this posting may seem a bit of a surprise, because we tend to focus a lot of our attention on women who are in their prime when we think about breast cancer.  We may even think that older - and very post-menopausal - women need not be as concerned about a medical risk often associated with hormonal activity. There has been research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering that basically says that regular testing works as well if not better for older patients as it does for younger patients, because if the cancer is caught early – and therefore small – these women have a very favorable prognosis.  In other research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston doctors followed about 65,000 women who had been diagnosed...