First, will you share a little with us of your own cancer story? You were diagnosed quite young—in your 30s.

As the first [Komen] race I attended was just six weeks after my surgery, I had this very emotional experience. I was surrounded by these women who were proud to be breast cancer survivors and it hit me square in the face that I wasn’t one of them yet.

The race made me aware of the disease, the leading risk factors and the ways to screen for breast cancer. The race is where women like me can feel comfortable talking about breast cancer, where we can celebrate survivors, which is a very powerful confirmation of dealing with diagnoses, going through treatment and living productive lives after that.

Whether I can ever say I’m cured is more of a personal distinction. I consider myself cured because I’m almost 17 years out from treatment now, and I don’t worry about a recurrence of breast cancer any more. There’s still a chance of long-term effects from therapy, but those aren’t from the cancer itself.

Receiving a breast cancer diagnosis is still frightening. Why should women have hope now, more than ever before, regarding breast cancer? The five-year survival rate for breast cancer, when caught early, is now 98%, compared with 74% in 1982. There are now more than 2.5 million breast cancer survivors alive today. Just knowing that there are that many survivors now gives hope.

And we’re getting more information to help define who’s really at risk. All women are at risk by virtue of being born female, and by virtue of aging. But we haven’t really understood other risk factors that well. Most breast cancers aren’t caused by genetic mutations, so we’re beginning to really understand risk related to family history better.

How has screening and treatment changed?

Mammography, including digital mammography, is still the gold standard for screening; we’re also learning more about who benefits from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), particularly for women in high-risk groups. We can now better tailor treatment based on the type of cancer, the tumor type. That determines which of the common treatments a woman will have: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormone therapy, which blocks the reception of estrogen for estrogen-positive breast cancers.

Long ago we relied on staging information and estrogen receptor status alone to make treatment decisions; now researchers can look at patterns of outcomes with varying treatment methods and determine which therapy works best with a particular type of breast cancer. The advantages are sparing a woman from a therapy she doesn’t need and getting her the best therapy first.

Can we say yet that we can cure breast cancer?

Well, and this is a very personal observation, there are many women who are cured of breast cancer with the therapies we have today. The challenge is that we don’t yet have the knowledge that would let us say a woman is cured with absolute certainty. That will come in time. What we can do is give women greater peace of mind—knowing that the current therapies really do offer a long life after treatment.