Scientific studies from around the world show that younger women, specifically those between the ages of 25 and 39, are increasingly being diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer-which has often spread further in the body by the time of diagnosis. A study on cancer rates in Geneva, Switzerland, published in 2007 found that breast cancer in this age group of women increased at the alarming rate of 46.7% per year from 2002 to 2004.

An analysis of breast cancer epidemiology in the United States noted a similarly accelerating diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer beginning in 1976 and extending to the last year for which data was available, 2009. The American findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in February 2013, noted that this trend was not seen in older women diagnosed with breast cancer. The authors did not speculate on any specific causes of this increase, instead attributing it to a vague multifactor etiology. They did make it clear that the results measured a true increase in the incidence of breast cancer and were not simply the outcome of better diagnostic techniques.