Smoking May increase Risk of Death in Women With Breast Cancer

New study finds, Breast cancer patients who smoke or previously smoked have a higher risk of dying than nonsmokers with breast cancer.
"Women who were smokers or had a record of smoking had a 39 percent higher rate of death due to breast cancer," said study author Dr. Dejana Braithwaite, an assistant professor of cancer epidemiology at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center of the University of California, San Francisco. 

"The strength of our study is, it's a very huge study of over 2,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer" at two sites in the United States, she said. For this study, Braithwaite followed 2,265 women of many ethnicities, all diagnosed with breast cancer between 1997 and 2000, for nine years on usual. The researchers looked at whether smoking affects breast cancer-related death rates and death rates from other causes.
During the follow-up, 164 women died of breast cancer and another 120 from other causes.In this study, 893 were former smokers,173 current and 1,199 never-smokers. "Their study is important," said Daniel Wartenberg, a professor of epidemiology at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J. He previously considered the effect of passive smoking on breast cancer death rates and found no link.
If these results are confirmed by other studies, he said, "that's a really important message, that getting people to stop smoking and prevent exposure may have a significant effect on reducing cancer deaths."

Breast Cancer Patients in Canada Drop With Decrease in HRT

A decline in breast cancer rates among postmenopausal women in Canada previous this decade coincided with a decrease in the use of hormone replacement therapy, a new study shows.
Researchers analyzed national data and found that "the nearly 10 percent drop in enveloping breast cancer rates coincided with the decline in use of hormone replacement therapy reported among Canadian women aged 50 to 69 years."
The largest decrease in hormone therapy occurred between 2002 and 2004, when use fell from 12.7 percent to 4.9 percent. During that same period, there was a 9.6 percent decline in breast cancer occurrence, said Prithwish De, of the Canadian Cancer Society, and colleagues.
Hormone therapy use decreased radically in several countries after the release in 2002 of a U.S. study that showed the health risks of hormone therapy outweighed the benefits. The researchers noted that breast cancer rates amongst postmenopausal women in Canada began to rise again in 2005. This may be further evidence of a connection between hormone therapy and breast cancer, they said.
"Such a return might be expected if [undetected] hormone-sensitive tumors were merely slowed by the withdrawal of hormone replacement therapy rather than prevented by it. If so, hormone substitute therapy may be thought to act as a promoter, rather than a cause of breast cancer," the researchers said in the release.

Gene Study Adds to investigate of Breast Cancer Risk

Findings may help scientists develop way to predict creature risk in BRCA1 mutation carriers. Newly recognized gene mutations may affect breast cancer risk in some women, an international team of researchers has found.
It is already known that BRCA1 gene mutations significantly increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. This new study looked at whether other gene mutations might adjust or alter that breast cancer risk.
The Mayo Clinic-led team first studied genetic mutations in 1,193 women with BRCA1 mutations who had enveloping breast cancer and 1,190 women with BRCA1 mutations who didn't have breast cancer. They then used those results to study a larger sample of women in each group.
The investigators finally identified five gene mutations in the region of chromosome 19p13 that modify breast cancer risk in women with BRCA1 gene mutations. But these mutations do not distress ovarian cancer risk in these women, the researchers noted.
The findings, available in the current issue of the journal Nature Genetics, may help improve understanding of the causes of breast cancer and "should be useful in helping determine individual risk for breast cancer in BRCA1 carriers," senior author Fergus Couch said in a news release from the Mayo Clinic.

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Alcohol drinking Increases Risk of Developing Subtype of Breast Cancer

A report that has been published in the magazine of the National Cancer Institute on 23rd August establishes that overriding alcohol on a normal basis tends to elevate the risk of increasing lobular and hormone receptor-positive breast cancer. However, it does not seem to be associated with invasive ductal carcinoma risk.
This is the leading study to scrutinize possibilities of a link between alcohol intake and subtypes of breast cancer risk, as written by the authors of the study.
A few studies before had tried to examine the probabilities that there could be a link between alcohol intake and hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.
But, a common of those did not examine breast cancer in relation to histology, or if tumor formed in milk ducts or milk producing lobules, the writers explained.
Christopher I. Li, MD, Ph.D, along with a squad at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center conducted an experimental, but observational, study in the Women’s Health scheme study. It was carried out between 1993 and 1998 and as well built-in 87,724 postmenopausal women between the age group of 50 and 79.
The research has been able to show a strong connection between lobular carcinoma and alcohol consumption, and also strongly connected alcohol intake with hormone-receptor positive breast cancer.