What Keeps Your Breasts Healthy (In Your 30s, 40s, 50s)

By Hallie Levine Sklar

What symptoms are normal as you get older? Which cancer screenings are best? And where the heck can you find a supportive bra? We’ve got your girls covered.

Let’s face it: There’s no body part women obsess about more than breasts—their size, shape, sag factor, and whether those strange pains stem from monthly PMS hormones or something more ominous, like breast cancer. All this nipple-gazing makes sense: Your chest changes over the decades, meaning you’re continually facing new questions and concerns. To help you troubleshoot at every stage, Health asked experts to get age-specific. Here’s the latest on how to keep your breasts healthy and looking great—now and in the years to come.

Your breasts in your 30s

Typically, in your 30s your breasts still have good elasticity and tone, says Shirley Archer, a health-and-fitness educator at the Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Busting Out. If you have kids now, you’ll notice changes postbaby. While your breasts get bigger during the actual pregnancy, you may, alas, permanently go down a half-cup or cup from your original size once you’ve given birth and/or breast-fed. (This phenomenon is called breast involution, a process where the milk-making system inside the breast shrinks because it’s not needed anymore.)

Your most common concern:
Breast pain. Many thirtysomethings have fibrocystic breasts, a grab bag term for tender lumpiness resulting from hormonal changes, says Holly Smedira, MD, a medical breast specialist at the Cleveland Clinic Breast Center. Although uncomfortable, the condition is benign and doesn’t increase breast-cancer risk. Cutting back on caffeine may help alleviate some of the pain, as may taking evening primrose oil (1.3 grams orally twice a day), a natural form of fatty acid believed to interfere with the body’s production of prostaglandins (inflammatory compounds that trigger breast pain). For severe cases, doctors sometimes prescribe Danazol, a steroid derivative that decreases levels of the reproductive hormones FSH and LH, or tamoxifen, a breast-cancer drug that helps relieve breast pain by blocking estrogen receptors, thus preventing estrogen’s effect on breast tissue.

Best breast-cancer-screening strategy:
Talk to your doctor. Discuss having a baseline mammogram between the ages of 35 and 40, suggests Julia Smith, MD, director of the New York University Cancer Institute Breast Cancer Screening and Prevention Program. You should also get a yearly breast exam from your gynecologist and do monthly breast self-exams. Although the American Cancer Society (ACS) issued new guidelines for breast cancer screening in 2003, making self-exams optional, experts say they’re still a must-do. “The more you examine your breasts, the more likely you are to differentiate between normal hormone-related bumpiness and a potentially precancerous growth,” Smith says.