October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and for Teresa Saltsman, it's a month that always strikes a chord.
"I was diagnosed in 2012 after I found a lump in my right breast that was very large. I called the doctor immediately and got in that day," said Saltsman.
After a series of tests, doctors told Saltsman she had cancer in both of her breasts, leading her through extensive rounds of chemotherapy and a bilateral mastectomy.
"You never know how you're going to feel after you wake up from that surgery because you hear so many stories," Saltsman remembered. "It wasn't bad, I did fine. I was just happy to have [the cancer] gone."
That number has decreased since 2000, partially due to early detection programs, such as the genetic counseling done in the Cancer Center at Unity Point Trinity in Moline.
"I talk to the patients about their families and we go through their family history," said Heather McCollough, a nurse practitioner at Unity Point Trinity. "I look at cancer patterns that might make me think that they have more of a predisposition to breast cancer and decide if it is a family that I would consider for genetic testing."
The breast cancer genes that doctors test for are BRCA1 and BRCA2. Women who have these genes are much more likely to develop breast and ovarian cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute.
However, only about five to ten percent of women actually carry those genes and there is plenty of debate when it comes to genetic testing. Many doctors complain that pre-testing for cancer genes is too expensive and can lead to unnecessary surgeries.
Not only can genetic testing cost thousands of dollars, but only about half of the women who carry the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene have had a family history with breast cancer. That means that many of the women who have the gene won't even think to get tested for it, because breast cancer doesn't already run in their family.
"The test is expensive, it can be uninformative, and it's only present in a very small group of women in the population," McCollough said.
McCollough said, in her opinion, genetic counseling is the best way to see if a patient is predisposed to getting breast cancer. Genetic counseling looks back through four generations of a patient's family to see if they could possibly carry the BRCA genes. If there has been a breast or ovarian cancer history, it is usually recommended that they go through a genetic test to see if they have the BRCA genes.
McCollough suggests that if women are on the fence about going through with genetic counseling, they should at least come in if their family has had a history with breast and ovarian cancer, especially if was in women under the age of fifty.