LaShae Rolle was feeling the strongest she’d ever felt in her life when she was stunned to be diagnosed with breast cancer.

The graduate student had been powerlifting and won a competition just four weeks before. She could squat 441 pounds, bench press 292 pounds and do a 497-pound deadlift.

Rolle was only 26 years old with no prior health problems, no risk factors and no family history of breast cancer.

She’d felt a lump in her right breast for some time, but her primary care physician called it “nothing,” she recalls.

So the news seemed impossible. A woman who is 30 years old or younger has less than a 1% chance of being diagnosed with breast cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute .

“I was very shocked,” Rolle, a cancer prevention researcher and a Ph.D. candidate at

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