their risk of breast cancer, but also their risk of melanoma, lung cancer and ovarian cancer! Evaluated over 30,000 Swedish women (ignore typo in second paragraph...read further) Again, it goes to show there is a lot more that is NOT known than is known!
Instead of trying to enlarge breasts, should women past forty try to "lift" their breasts by reduction mammoplasty to decrease their risk, especially those at high risk? These statistics may still end up being a fluke, although with such large numbers it is unlikely. A prospective clinical trial will take years to confirm this retrospective study. Perhaps it is because without the
self-consciousness of having their breasts bounce around so much with exercise they exercised more, or lost weight to avoid having their breasts appear even smaller as their girth increased with age, or because those who were health-conscious enough to have such a procedure prophylactically also ate more fresh fruits and vegetables...Or perhaps the data are real and there is some hormonal feedback mechanism (there are a multitude of these) by which all these different tumors are prevented even though surgery in general is felt to set off an inflammatory reaction which can encourage the growth of tumors already present elsewhere (micromets, etc) The possible explanations are endless...
Breast reduction may offer prophylactic mastectomy alternative
Epidemiologic results suggest that breast reduction surgery may offer an alternative to prophylactic mastectomy in women at high risk of developing breast cancer.
The study, published in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, focuses on 30,44 Swedish women who underwent reduction mammoplasty between 1965 and 1993, and were followed-up using data from the Swedish Cancer Registry until 2002.
Of note, breast cancer occurred in just 443 of the breast reduction patients compared with 624 cases that would have been expected using data from the general population, giving a significantly reduced standardized incidence ratio of 0.71.
This ratio was not significantly altered after taking into consideration age at time of surgery, number of years since surgery, or calendar year of surgery, lead investigator Jon Fryzek (International Epidemiology Institute, Rockville, Maryland, USA) and co-workers observe.
Interestingly, breast reduction surgery was associated with a significant 25% reduction in expected lung cancer diagnoses, with borderline significant reductions also found for ovarian cancer and melanoma, at 20% and 25%, respectively.
"Our study of over 30,000 women with long-term follow-up offers further evidence that women undergoing breast reduction surgery have reduced breast cancer risk," Fyzek's team concludes.
Recognizing that the procedure may be of use for women at high risk of breast cancer who find the disfiguration of prophylactic mastectomy unacceptable, the researchers suggest: "As the evidence from large-scale cohort studies accumulates, direct testing of this reduction in risk through clinical trials should be considered."
Breast Cancer Res Treat 2006; 97: 131–134
http://www.springerlink.com/(j2g3k2b...ferrer=default
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