A third of women (34%) fail to check their breasts at least once a month for warning signs of breast cancer and 10% never do so, according to a survey.
The 2023 ‘Boob Census’ by beauty brand Avon polled 1,001 UK women aged over 18 and 439 teenage (aged 14-17) girls.
The 34% figure showed almost no improvement in awareness of the importance of regular checking on the 36% reported in the same poll carried out last year, it highlighted.
For those who do not check their breasts for changes monthly, more than half (53%) said this was simple because they forget to check. More than a quarter (27%) admitted they were not sure what to check for, while more than one in 10 (12%) said they were too worried to check.
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A quarter of the women polled said they did not feel confident they could spot a sign of breast cancer, rising to nearly a third (30%) of those aged 18 to 24.
Next month (October) is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and one of the key awareness-raising messages will be encouraging people to check their breasts as part of a monthly routine.
One in six (16%) of the women polled said they had never been taught how to check their breasts, even though that was a slight improvement on the 19% reported in 2022.
For those who did know how to check their breasts, only a third (33%) learned how to do so in a medical or education setting. More than half (51%) got the information from a family member, TV or online research.
Of the teenage girls polled, less than half (42%) said they had discussed or learned about breast health in school.
More than a quarter felt uncomfortable discussing breast health with a medical professional (28%), or because they felt embarrassed talking about it (74%), or because they thought it was “private” (26%).
Social media platforms, including TikTok, also now play a substantial role in breast health awareness for more than a third (35%) of teenagers, with almost three-quarters expressing a higher likelihood of paying attention to breast health awareness messages when encountered on social media.
Angela Cretu, chief executive at Avon, said: “As women, we all lead such busy lives, and it’s easy to forget to look after ourselves. We owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to think about our breast health.”
Separately, two studies in The Lancet have argued that taking a more “feminist approach” to cancer could save the lives of 800,000 women a year.
An approach that focused more on understanding and unpicking unequal power dynamics and gender and social inequalities, and was more proactively focused on ‘women’s cancers’, such as breast and cervical cancer, could save lives, the first study, part of a special Lancet Commission, argued.
As many as 1.5 million premature cancer deaths in women under 70 in 2020 could have been prevented with the elimination of exposures to key risk factors or via early detection and diagnosis, the second piece of research also concluded.
A further 800,000 premature deaths from cancer among women aged 30 to 69 could be avoided each year if all women had access to optimal cancer care, it said.
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