At 29, she found a lump in her breast. What younger women should know about cancer

Breast cancer can affect younger women, even those who feel healthy and have no family history of the disease. Karina Rodriguez was just 29 when she found a lump in her breast. The discovery changed her life. “At that moment, I was thinking to myself, I don t know that I ve ever done a breast exam, and I don t know that I m doing this correctly. But at that moment, I found the lump,” Rodriguez said. Rodriguez, now a breast cancer survivor, received her treatment at Baptist Health Herbert Wertheim Cancer Institute. She said she never expected to hear the word “cancer,” especially because she had no family history of the disease and considered herself healthy. Her experience comes as doctors point to an increase in breast cancer diagnoses among younger women. “So the incidence of breast cancer in young women has increased over the most recent years,” said Dr. Ahkeel Allen of TopLine MD Alliance. “Since 2019, moving forward, overall, the general population, the incidence ha