Breast Cancer: Let's Talk Numbers

For Koning and many women around the world, October is an important month to share ways to act, learn, and raise awareness about Breast Cancer. This week, we are spreading the word on what breast cancer looks like today using the American Cancer Society’s Breast Cancer Facts and Figures 2024-2025. 

What Breast Cancer Looks like in the US Today

• Approximately 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in her lifetime, and 1 in 43 will die from the disease. 
• The highest risk of breast cancer diagnosis is among women in their 70s, whereas women in their 80s have the highest risk of breast cancer death.
• Approximately 30% of cases can be attributed to potentially modifiable risk factors, such as excess body weight, physical inactivity, and alcohol consumption.
• The strongest risk factors are a personal or family history of breast cancer or a personal history of lesions associated with risk or certain inherited genetic variations.
• Among women ages 40 years and older, an estimated 49% and 67% had a mammogram in the past one and two years, respectively, in 2021.
• The lowest imaging prevalence is among women ages 40-44 years and those who have less than a high school education, are uninsured, or immigrated in the past 10 years.

The purpose of Koning’s technology is to transform these low exam numbers by incentivizing more women to get their annual exams. Although the breast cancer death rate has dropped by 44% since 1989 because of advances in early detection and treatment, there are still too many women who skip their scans because they do not have enough information or financial means to visit a nearby location, or simply because they find conventional mammograms uncomfortable. Of those who do get exams, far too many get false positive or false negative results when using conventional imaging methods. 

Our revolutionary Koning Vera Breast CT is a compression-free modality that produces high-contrast real 3D-images of the breast with exceptional spatial resolution. The scan is done without painful compression at radiation levels in the range of conventional mammograms.

This Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we recognize how far we have come while still fighting for all women to be within the scope of progress. Click here for more information about our vision – we are here for you at the earliest stage and beyond.