This October, the American Cancer Society commemorates the 40th anniversary of the founding of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
In 1985, ACS co-led the effort to start Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a week-long campaign to educate women about the importance of early screening and routine mammograms for breast cancer detection and treatment. In 2025, more than 316,000 women are expected to be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in the United States, making the efforts of the awareness month increasingly important.
According to the ACS’s Cancer Facts & Figures 2025 report, approximately 1 in 8 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer during their lifetime, and 1 in 43 will die from the disease. However, there has been tremendous progress; ACS researchers project that by 2035, the number of breast cancer survivors will reach 5.3 million.
