Do you want to know your risk for developing invasive breast cancer? If so, you can use an online interactive tool for measuring your five year risk and also your lifetime risk of developing the disease.

There are seven questions to answer to calculate your risk. It should not be used by women who already have had a breast cancer diagnosis. This tool has been used successfully in clinics for women with a strong family history of breast cancer.

Keep in mind that other factors also affect the risk of developing breast cancer that are not accounted for by the online tool. Women who do not get mammograms will have a lower chance of having their breast cancer detected.

After I was diagnosed with Stage IIa breast cancer one of the things I did was go crazy with searching, searching and more searching on the internet. What was I searching for? I'll tell you. I was searching for some prognostic information that said that I was definitely going to survive. Guess what? I didn't find what I was searching for.

Some prognostic information for my stage of disease sounded great to me, other things I read were not so great. So what did I do? I printed out the ones that sounded great, of course.

I did find in my searching a prognostic indicator that I was not aware of -- one that wasn't mentioned by my oncologist. The prognostic indicator I found is called the Nottingham Prognostic Index (NPI). NPI has been around since 1992. It can give physicians a guide to see if chemotherapy is warranted just like how the staging system is used. This prognostic indicator takes into consideration the size of the tumor, the nodal status and also the grade of the tumor. This information is plugged into a calculation using all three factors.