Category: Breast Cancer

Feminists Against Silicone Breast Implants

An interesting example of the hypocrisy of groups like the National Organization for Women is its recent public opposition to the possible re-introduction of silicone breast implants. NOW argues that there is not enough long term data to justify saying that silicone breast implants are safe, but NOW’s real objection seems to be that silicone breast implants are not politically correct enough.

There are plenty of long-term studies of the effects of silicone breast implants in women who had them before the FDA’s temporary ban on the implants — almost all of which found that there simply were no adverse health risks associated with implants. The concerns that implants increased the risk of breast cancer or contributed to chronic diseases of the early 1990s turned out to be simple hysteria.

But nonetheless, NOW President Kim Gandy complaints that the FDA is only reviewing two years wroth of data and, “Two years of data is not going to give you any valid information so that women will know what’s going into their bodies.”

Nonsense. In this case NOW has simply stooped to the level of its anti-abortion opponents who used and continue to use exactly this argument against both oral contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs such as RU-486. In fact when the FDA dragged its feet on approving RU-486, it was Gandy who was whining about excessive bureaucracy and overblown concerns about a drug that had proven safe through decades of use elsewhere in the world. As Gandy put it in a NOW press release,

It’s all too typical that our U.S. bureaucracy would take this important medical advancement for women and make it as difficult as possible for us to take advantage of its full potential.

If only makers of silicone breast implants could find a way to make them have some sort of contraceptive or abortion abilities as well, perhaps they would be politically correct enough for NOW to stop its ridiculous attempt to prevent women from making their own private health choices about implants.

Sources:

Groups oppose allowing silicone breast implants. Lisa Richwine, Reuters, July 21, 2003.

NOW Members Call for FDA Approval of Mifepristone (RU-486) for Abortion, Cancer and Other Treatments. Press Release, National Organization for Women, Summer 2000.

Breast Cancer Study Finds No Link with EMF Exposure

A study of Long Island women recently found that there was no association between breast cancer and exposure to electromagnetic fields.

The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, examined 576 women with breast cancer and 585 women without the disease. Researchers at Sony Brook University measured the electromagnetic fields in various rooms of the houses of the women, and also mapped the power lines around each house.

Like previous such studies, it found no association between EMF exposure and breast cancer risk. The study also took pains to examine only women who had lived in their houses for at least 15 years, to test if there was any association with long term exposure to EMF.

Dr. M. Cristina Leske, who headed up the six-year, $2.5 million study, said in a press release announcing the results of the study,

The results are reassuring in that residential levels of EMF, such as from electrical wiring in or around the home, were not related to breast cancer. Given these results, we now have valuable information that leads us to conclude that we can now focus on other possible risk factors. Our team is most grateful for the support of the Long Island women, who made our study possible.

Sources:

Study finds no link between breast cancer, power lines. Associated Press, June 25, 2003.

Breast Cancer and Electromagnetic Fields Study. Press Release, Stony Brook University, June 25, 2003.

Marin County Breast Cancer Data Faulty

There has been a long-simmering controversy over breast cancer rates in Marin County, California. Marin County is one of the wealthiest counties in the United States and also has one of the highest breast cancer rates — 198 cases per 100,000 population compared to a national average of 139 per 100,000 for the rest of the country.

Activists who believe that pollution is a major contributor to breast cancer seized on this cancer cluster as evidence for their views, although a number of alternative explanations were possible. But now it turns out that there is an even better explanation — the data that claimed Marin County had a breast cancer incidence of 198 cases per 100,000 population appears to have been faulty.

The faulty data came to light after research in 2002 said that the rate of cancer for white women in Marin County had increased from 191 cases per 100,000 in 1998 to 230 cases per 100,000 in 1999. That sort of massive jump was extremely suspicious.

It turns out that such estimates had been using faulty data from the U.S. Census Bureau that dramatically undercounted the population of women in Marin County. Census data from 2000 showed that the 1990 estimates that such studies had been using underreported the number of white women 45-64 in Marin County by close to 20 percent. Revised breast cancer rates have not been released.

Ironically, another recent study of breast cancer among women in Marin County will also not please the activist who want pollution to be the cause and accuse researchers of “blaming the victim” anytime another cause is put forward.

A study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and published in the online journal Breast Cancer Research found a strong correlation between alcohol consumption and breast cancer among women in Marin County. Women who consumed two drinks a day had twice the breast cancer risk, and the risk increased with self-reported alcohol consumption.

That study was small, comparing 285 Marin County women with breast cancer to 286 healthy women living in the county. But it did find no correlation between breast cancer and length of time living in Marin County, suggesting the high breast cancer rate in Marin County has something to do with a confounding factor that women there share rather than something to do with Marin County itself.

Source:

Marin County breast cancer rates not as high as once thought. Justin Pritchard, Associated Press, April 4, 2003.

Study: Marin breast cancer related to alcohol consumption. Associated Press, May 7, 2003.

Study Finds No Increased Risk of Breast Cancer from the Pill

A study of more than 9,000 U.S. women ranging from 35 to 65 has found no evidence that oral contraceptive use increases the risk of developing breast cancer.

A 1996 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine had claimed that there was indeed such an increased risk, but that was a meta-analysis of 54 different epidemiological studies.

In the current study about 4,500 women with breast cancer and 4,500 without breast cancer were questioned in detail about their use of oral contraceptives, including older contraceptive pills which some researchers have suggested might be more likely to contribute to cancer because of their much larger levels of hormones.

But, in fact, the study found no increased risk of breast cancer for women who had taken such pills.

Source:

Pill does not increase risk of breast cancer. Gaia Vince, NewScientist.Com, June 26, 2002.

Ronald Bailey on the Long Island Cancer Cluster

Writing in Reason, Ronald Bailey has a nice look at the so-called Long Island Cancer Cluster and a recent study designed to find out why so many women in and around Long Island have breast cancer. After spending several years and $8 million, the National Cancer Institute study concluded that whatever might be contributing to the cancer cluster, it isn’t exposure to chemicals and pesticides in the Long Island area.

Research into breast cancer in Nassau and Suffolk counties in Long Island found that women there had rates of breast cancer that were roughly 3 percent higher than the rest of the nation. Some breast cancer advocates were convinced that the only possible explanation for the higher rate was due to chemicals in the area.

But a study of blood and urine from 3,000 women in the Long Island area found no evidence for this hypothesis. The study looked at levels of DDT, PCBs, chlordanes and chemicals indicative of cigarette smoking. The bottom line — women exposed to such chemicals were no more likely to develop breast cancer than women not exposed to such chemicals. This result was consistent with other studies such as an almost 33,000 patient study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 that found no evidence that exposure to DDT or PCB increased the risk of a woman developing breast cancer.

Why would advocates focus on DDT, PCBs, chlordanes and other chemicals? In part because those chemicals have all been found to be carcinogenic in mice, rats and other laboratory animals. Now animal tests are helpful in identifying substances that are potentially harmful to human beings, but they are not the last word. Some substances that are harmful to laboratory animals are perfectly safe in human beings, while some substances that do not harm mice or rats are nonetheless very harmful in human beings. Merely because animal tests indicate that a substance is likely to be carcinogenic does not mean that it actually is in human beings.

But that seems to be the message that some people are taking away from media reports on such research. The New York Times, for example, quotes Geri Barish, president of 1 in 9: The Long Island Breast Cancer Action Coalition, as wondering how, if these chemicals are carcinogenic in animal tests,

How could they absolutely say that a known carcinogen is not absolutely involved in the cause of cancer? . . . I refuse to accept the fact that they didn’t find anything. They didn’t find anything conclusive because in the scientific world it has to be exact.

Barish wants further studies to be done, but Dr. Barbara Hulka, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, told The Times that so many studies have already been done looking for a link between DDT, PCBs and breast cancer that there may be nothing more to learn there. Hulka told The Times

I think it is important that these studies have been done. . . [but] There comes a point after so many studies are done that it becomes less productive to continue that line of work.

There have been so many epidemiological studies of DDT and PCBs, for example, that if they really caused or contributed to breast cancer one would think that at some point this would show up clearly in such studies. But in fact, all of the large studies of these chemicals have so far found no statistically significant connection between chemicals and cancer.

Perhaps it is time to recognize that cancer clusters are always going to occur largely because cancer is never going to be evenly distributed throughout a population, and begin taking the millions of dollars that have been devoted to looking at cancer clusters and spending it on more fruitful avenues of research.

Sources:

Looking for the link. Gina Kolata, The New York Times, August 11, 2002.

Cluster bomb. Ronald Bailey, Reason, August 14, 2002.

Upcoming Abortion/Breast Cancer Trial in North Carolina

Women’s eNews recently reported about an upcoming trial in Fargo, North Dakota, in which a judge will be asked to weight the claims and counterclaims about whether or not abortion contributes to increased risk of breast cancer. Not only are anti-abortion advocates relying on junk science, but they’re own claims are deceptive. Rather than urge women not to have abortions, their advice would be more accurate if they said: have a child before you are 22 or face increased risk of breast cancer. Lets look at the epidemiological evidence before moving on to the biology of abortion, pregnancy and breast cancer.

Anti-abortion advocates always cite the same weak epidemiological data. There are quite a few studies showing that women who have induced abortions have increases risk of breast cancer anywhere from 20 to 30 percent higher than women who do not have induced abortions. The proper reaction to such studies is — big deal.

Those are very low increased risk levels for epidemiological studies — they are so low that it is difficult for even well-designed studies to accurately measure such low levels of risk.

This problem is compounded by the fact that most of these studies suffer from a number of flaws. The most obvious of these, which Womens’ eNews does an excellent job of explaining, is recall bias. Women’s who have breast cancer are far more likely to tell researchers that they had an abortion than are women who do not have breast cancer. A Swedish study, for example, found that women with breast cancer were 50 percent more likely to report having had an abortion than were women without breast cancer. Women’s eNews quotes Lancet Oncology editorial as saying that, “healthy control women have been more reluctant to report on a controversial, emotionally charged subject such as induced abortion, than have patients with breast cancer.”

Of course, a major study involving 1.5 million Danish women that relied on medical records rather than women’s recall. The results? No increased risk of breast cancer at all for women who had abortions compared to women who did not.

The claim that abortion increases risk of breast cancer is nonsense. Sort of. An interesting possibility is that some women may in fact increase their risk of breast cancer if they do something that is increasingly common in the Western world — delay the age at which they have their first child.

A recent study of 100,000 French women, for example, found that women who gave birth to their first child in their 30s were 63 percent more likely to develop breast cancer compared to women who gave birth to their first child by the age of 22. The study also found that women who started having periods the earliest also had a higher risk of breast cancer compared to those who began having periods the latest.

Why should the age at which women have their first child or begin menstruating have anything to do with breast cancer? Dr. Steven Austad offers an excellent summary of the link in his book, Why We Age,

Simply put, estrogen and progesterone increase the risk of breast cancer because they cause the cells lining the milk ducts in the breast to divide prolifically during the latter part of the menstrual cycle, when the body is preparing for pregnancy. When no pregnancy occurs, these newly formed cells die, returning the breast to its original condition. During the next cycle, there is another round of cell division and cell death if no pregnancy occurs.

And of course, the more this cycle occurs, the higher the risk of a mutation that might later develop into breast cancer. But once a woman gives birth, this cycle stops — the cells become permanently differentiated and the monthly division/death process comes to a halt.

So women who want to really reduce their risk of breast cancer should have a child as soon as possible after menstruating. Or if you want to do even better than that, go for a hysterectomy — studies have found that young women who have been forced to have hysterectomies for one reason or another have much lower rates of cancer than do healthy women. This applies to men as well — studies of men who have been sterilized find that they have far lower rates of cancer than men who have not.

If there is any increased risk of breast cancer attendant with abortion, it almost certainly is due to the women using abortion to delay the age at which they first give birth. Women who are on birth control or celibate will also experience the same risk, though this writer has to wonder if abortion activists are prepared to warn all childless women that they are endangering their lives. Would they require the Roman Catholic Church to inform childless women who want to become nuns that they are imperiling their health? Somehow I suspect now.

Sources:

Cancer risks for older mothers. The BBC, February 13, 2002.

Judge to Rule on Abortion, Breast Cancer Link. Margaret A. Woodbury, Women’s eNews, February 17, 2002.

Why we age. Steven N. Austad, 1997.