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Breast cancer study surprises scientists
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A decade-long research effort to uncover the environmental causes of breast cancer by studying both lab animals and a group of healthy US girls has turned up some surprises, scientists say.
At the center of the investigation are 1,200 school girls who do not have breast cancer, but who have already given scientists new clues about the possible origins of the disease.
Some risk factors are well understood, including early puberty, later age of childbearing, late onset of menopause, estrogen replacement therapy, drinking alcohol and exposure to radiation.
Advances have also been made in identifying risky gene mutations, but these cases make up a small minority.
“Most of breast cancer, particularly in younger women, does not come from family histories,” said Leslie Reinlib, a program director at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
“We have still got 80 percent that has got to be environmental,” said Reinlib, who is part of the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program (BCERP) program that has received some US$70 million in funds from the US government since 2003.
Some of its researchers track what is happening in the human population, while others study how carcinogens, pollutants and diet affect the development of the mammary glands and breast tumors in lab mice.
The program’s primary focus is on puberty because its early onset “is probably one of the best predictors of breast cancer in women,” Reinlib said.
Puberty is a time of rapid growth of the breast tissue. Research on survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombings in Japan has shown that those exposed in puberty had a higher likelihood of developing breast cancer in adulthood.
The 1,200 US girls enrolled in the study at sites in New York City, California and the Cincinnati, Ohio, area in 2004. They were aged six to eight years.
The aim was to measure the girls’ chemical exposures through blood and urine tests, and to learn how environmental exposures affected the onset of puberty and perhaps breast cancer risk later in life.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women and took 508,000 lives worldwide in 2011, according to the World Health Organization.
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