October is breast cancer awareness month and a good time for all of us to consider risk factors for developing breast cancer. Most are familiar with the risk factors related to family and certain gene mutations (BRCA), but it’s important to also consider lifestyle-related risk factors. These are important because these are the risk factors you can do something about. We call these risk factors, modifiable. They differ from the non-modifiable risk factors like age and genetics.

Over the past 40 years, the number of deaths per year from cervical cancer has declined by 50 percent. According to the American Cancer Society, the decrease in mortality is due in large part to the higher frequency of pap smears, which started in the ’70s.