Not My Breasts

Final weekly roundup: Tips for breast cancer prevention

October has come to an end and so has our tip series for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. But, please remember that these helpful, everyday tips can still be found on the Breast Cancer Fund’s blog. We definitely encourage you to revisit these suggestions, written by Dr. Janet Gray, editor of the Breast Cancer Fund’s 2008 and upcoming 2010 State of the Evidence reports, and to look to the Breast Cancer Fund’s Web site and Facebook page for upcoming healthy living ideas.

Here’s a recap of this week’s tips for prevention:

• Avoid exposures to PAHs, whenever possible –- buy low-emission vehicles, maintain your car and avoid unnecessary exposure to tobacco smoke.
• Include soy and other vegetables in your regular diet, but avoid high-dose supplements of soy derivatives.
• Consult with your medical team to minimize your exposures to radiation –- the longest- and best-established environmental cause of breast cancer.
• Keep toys made with phthalates out of your children’s mouths and hands.
• Avoid use of synthetic hormone replacement therapies (HRT), especially progestin-estrogen combinations.

Taking individual actions toward reducing your everyday exposures to toxic chemicals and radiation is a step in the direction of breast cancer prevention, but stopping this disease before it starts also requires greater accountability by corporations and policymakers to protect our health and the health of our environment. Please continue to join us in important legislative initiatives, such as banning BPA from food and beverage containers, expanding the FDA’s authority to make sure cosmetics are safe, and creating a national health-tracking system to connect disease rates and pollution.

Thank you for taking time throughout October to share these tips with your family and friends. Your help has been a crucial piece in expanding the conversation about breast cancer to include prevention.

Rush to hormone-replacement therapy fueled by industry-funded "science"

Did you catch the front-page story in yesterday’s New York Times chronicling how, from 1998 to 2005, pharmaceutical giant Wyeth paid ghostwriters to produce scientific papers that “emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks” of hormone-replacement therapy ?

You may recall that several years back, hundreds of thousands of menopausal women came off the very popular HRT after researchers documented a link between the hormone drugs and rising incidences of breast cancer (as well as heart disease, stroke and blood clots) among women being treated with HRT.

This should not have come as a complete surprise: the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has listed estrogens as known human carcinogens since 1987, and their component hormones since 1976. But what’s more troubling is that we now know that the rush to HRT was based not so much on a lack of information of the risks, but on a misinformation campaign funded the makers of the HRT drugs

Medical journals have some soul-searching to do. Why is it that they did not (and in most cases still do not) require of their contributors full disclosure of conflicts of interest? Our health, even our very lives, hang in the balance.

Drop in breast cancer rate linked to decline in HRT use

Today's New England Journal of Medicine reports an 8.6 percent decline in U.S. breast cancer rates between 2001 and 2004, and connects that drop to fewer women using hormone replacement therapy to counter the symptoms of menopause.

NEJM's analysis of National Cancer Institute registries showed a sharp decline in 2003—after HRT use was linked to breast cancer risk—followed by a leveling off in 2004. The effect was particularly robust for post-menopausal women with estrogen-receptor-positive breast tumors (cancers that grow in response to estrogen).

And while some researchers argue that it's premature to attribute the decline to HRT (stopping HRT may have slowed the growth of some tumors, but they could show up in later years, for example), it's clearly been enough evidence to convince many women to say no thanks.

Hormones play an important role in the development of breast cancer, whether from HRT or hormone-disrupting chemicals (atrazine, bisphenol A, dibutyl phthalate, dioxin, organochlorine pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and others). Elimination of this one hormone source meant 30,000 fewer women received a diagnosis of breast cancer over the course of the 2-year NEJM study; now imagine how many more women could be spared if we eliminate these other exposure sources.

(Read more coverage of today's HRT story from the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times.)