Breast cancer is the most common cancer in American women except for skin cancers.`

Researchers at the American Cancer Society estimate that there will be 252,710 new cases of invasive breast cancer in women in the United States in 2017. Some 40,610 women will die from the disease.

In addition, there will be 63,410 cases this year of carcinoma in situ, abnormal cells that may be an early form of cancer.

Over a lifetime, a woman living in the United States has a 12.4 percent risk — one in eight — of being diagnosed with breast cancer.

Non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks have higher breast cancer incidence and mortality than other racial and ethnic groups. The incidence of cancer in black women was slightly lower than that of whites, but the death rate during 2011 to 2015 was 42 percent higher in black women.