Remembering Linda McCartney and Breast Cancer

A photographer, and a cancer centre that carries her name

Linda McCartney was an American photographer and musician who shot portraits of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix, and who played in Wings with her husband Paul. BBC News reports that she and Paul married in 1969, had four children, and that she died from breast cancer in 1998.

Her name is now attached to a hospital. BBC News reports that the Linda McCartney Centre at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, a breast cancer treatment unit named after her, was granted the Freedom of the City in recognition of its work on advanced treatments.

Beyond that, the details of her illness and care were her family's business. What is public and useful is the disease, and specifically what happens when breast cancer stops staying in the breast.

Cancer keeps the name of where it started

This is the single most confusing thing about advanced cancer, and the National Cancer Institute states the rule plainly. "Metastatic cancer has the same name as the primary cancer. For example, breast cancer that spreads to the lung is called metastatic breast cancer, not lung cancer."

The reason is biological rather than bureaucratic. A breast cancer cell that lands in the liver is still a breast cancer cell. It carries breast cancer's receptors and gene changes, and it responds to breast cancer drugs. Treating it as liver cancer would fail.

NCI lists bone among the sites breast cancer most commonly reaches, along with the liver, lung, and brain. Pain and fractures are the common signs when bone is involved.

What the pathology report drives

Two breast cancers of the same size can need completely different drugs. NCI names the features that decide: menopausal status, stage, tumor grade, estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor status, and HER2 status.

Receptors are docking points on the cancer cell. NCI states that estrogen receptor status is measured mainly by immunohistochemistry, a stain applied to the tissue, and that "any staining of 1% of cells or more is considered positive for ER." HER2, a growth-signaling protein, is measured by that stain or by counting gene copies.

Those results still steer treatment after the cancer has spread. NCI organizes advanced disease into groups by them: metastatic HER2-negative hormone receptor-positive disease, metastatic HER2-low disease, and metastatic triple-negative disease. For the hormone receptor-positive group, NCI lists endocrine therapy combined with a CDK inhibitor, a drug class that blocks proteins driving cell division.

What the goal of treatment becomes

NCI is honest about the shift. "Often, the goal of treating metastatic cancer is to control it by stopping or slowing its growth." Cure stops being the target, and duration and quality of life become the target instead.

That is not the same as giving up, and NCI says so: "Some people can live for years with metastatic cancer that is well controlled." Treatment in this setting is a sequence. One drug works until it stops working, then another begins, and the sequence is planned in advance.

Treatment has also changed considerably since 1998. Several of the drug classes NCI now lists for advanced breast cancer did not exist then.

When to get checked

CDC names these warning signs. Each one earns an appointment now rather than at a routine visit.

• A new lump in the breast or armpit
• Thickening or swelling in part of the breast
• Dimpled, irritated, red, or flaky skin on the breast or nipple
• A nipple turning inward, or nipple pain
• Nipple discharge that is not breast milk, including blood
• A change in one breast's size or shape
• Breast pain unrelated to your cycle

CDC adds that these signs occur with non-cancerous conditions too. That is an argument for getting checked, not for waiting.

For anyone already treated for breast cancer, a second list matters. Report bone pain that persists for weeks or wakes you at night, unexplained shortness of breath, a new persistent cough, abdominal swelling, yellowing of the eyes, headaches that are new for you, or any weakness on one side of the body.

Screening, and what the recommendation says

CDC states the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation directly: women aged 40 to 74 at average risk should have a mammogram every two years. CDC adds that different schedules may apply to women at higher than average risk.

Higher risk includes a strong family history and certain inherited gene changes. If either applies, that conversation belongs well before 40, and it may include genetic counseling.

Diagnosis, step by step

NCI's clinician guidance lists the diagnostic sequence as "mammography, ultrasonography, breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), if clinically indicated" and then biopsy. Imaging can raise suspicion. Only tissue settles it.

Staging uses the AJCC TNM system, which records tumor size, lymph node involvement, and whether the cancer has spread to distant organs. NCI notes that a patient who has distant disease at the outset is stage IV and stays stage IV, regardless of how well treatment works afterward. Stage is a description of the starting point, not a running score.

What the numbers describe

The American Cancer Society projects 321,910 new cases of female breast cancer and 42,140 deaths in the United States for 2026, a figure SEER reprints on its stat page. SEER, a surveillance program run by the National Cancer Institute, supplies the measured statistics that follow. The rate of new cases is 132.5 per 100,000 women per year, and the median age at diagnosis is 64.

Five-year relative survival across all stages is 91.9 percent, using cases from 2016 through 2022. Relative survival compares people with the diagnosis to people of the same age without it. By stage, in that same 2016 to 2022 group, SEER lists 100.0 percent for localized disease, 87.5 percent when nearby nodes are involved, and 33.8 percent once the cancer has reached distant organs.

SEER records 64 percent of those cases as localized when found and 6 percent as distant. That distribution is the whole argument for screening and for taking a new lump seriously.

Every figure here is a group average built from hundreds of thousands of records. None of them was calculated about any individual reader, and none of them can predict one person's course.

Sources

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-43987996
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-merseyside-25126438
• https://www.cancer.gov/types/breast/hp/breast-treatment-pdq
• https://www.cancer.gov/types/metastatic-cancer
• https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html
• https://www.cdc.gov/breast-cancer/symptoms/index.html
• https://www.cdc.gov/breast-cancer/screening/index.html