Dr. Rebecca Johnson, who was diagnosed with breast cancer when
she was 27,… (Elaine Thompson, Associated…) Rebecca Johnson was
27 years old and had just graduated from medical school when she
got the diagnosis: breast cancer. She thought she was a rare
case, but then a few of her friends got it too. So did some
friends of friends. Was it all just a coincidence, or was breast
cancer becoming more common in younger women? "I really
wondered," said Johnson, now 44 and the director of the
Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology program at Seattle
Children's Hospital. So she examined decades' worth of data from
the National Cancer Institute and made a disturbing find: Cases
of younger women with advanced breast cancer have increased
about 2% each year since the mid-1970s and show no signs of
abating. The results, published in Wednesday's edition of the
Journal of the American Medical Assn., confirmed the suspicions
of many oncologists who had noticed an uptick in patients
younger than 40 with cancer that had spread to