Breast Cancer in Middle-Aged Women: A Literature Review

Abstract

Mammary neoplasia consists of the disorderly proliferation of defective cells in the mammary ducts, resulting from several factors that drive their development in the tissue. The objectives of this work are: to verify the incidence of breast cancer in middle-aged women, and to identify possible risk factors for the onset of breast cancer in middle-aged women. An integrative literature review was carried out with searches in the Lilacs, Pubmed and Medline databases. The DeCS were used: “Breast Neoplasms”, “Middle-Aged Person”, “Risk Factors” and “Post-Menopause”, in Portuguese and English, crossing with the Boolean operators AND and OR. Inclusion criteria were: complete articles; published in Portuguese, English and Spanish, between the years 2018 and 2022, available in full and free of charge. The exclusion criteria were: non- pertinence to the theme. 122 articles were found, and 08 were selected to compose this study. It was identified that the main risk factors for the development of breast cancer are related to postmenopausal women, that is, women who are in middle age, are obesity and high estrogen production, alcoholism, history family and unhealthy eating patterns. It can be inferred that postmenopausal women linked to risk factors for the development of breast cancer need assistance based on health prevention, being therefore assisted by the nursing team, which should corroborate with the dissemination and encouragement mammography and breast self-examination for early detection of cancer.