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Battling Breast Cancer and Knowing Your Risks during Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Photo: National Cancer Institute

When actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus announced in she had been diagnosed with breast cancer last week, she did so alongside a sobering statistic: one in eight women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer. The most recent data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows more than 236,000 women—and more than 2,000 men—are diagnosed with that form of cancer each year. In Florida, that's roughly 14,000 new breast cancer cases annually.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and Tammy Lennox, the American Cancer Society of Florida'shealth systems manager for Southwest Florida, joins Gulf Coast Live to talk about awareness, events, and other breast cancer-related outreach happening in Southwest Florida this month.

Also joining the program is Russell Silverman, the executive director with the Florida Breast Cancer Foundation, to discuss what factors can be controlled when it comes to breast cancer, like overall health and regular screenings, and what can't, like genetics. He'll also discuss the support for women before, during, and after treatment and remission, what screening methods are available, and what women can do if they have a family history of breast cancer.

Matthew Smith is a reporter and producer of WGCU’s Gulf Coast Live.
Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.
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