Secondhand smoking raises breast cancer risk

By David Liu

There has been a debate over whether women would start receiving mammogram screenings at 40 or 50 since the US Preventive Services Task Force changed its recommendations on mammogram screening last month.

The old mammogram screening guidelines recommends that women start the examination at age 40 and the US Preventive Services Task Force now recommends women should start the exam at 50. Starting the procedure at 50, women can receive similar benefits while risks associated with the screening can be cut by nearly 50 percent to say the least.

Many women are angry and feel like the task force is inhumane and insist that they would be better off starting mammogram screening at younger age. Radiologists and oncologists say the new guidelines are crazy because they say the procedure save lives as studies have shown.

The medical circle touts mammogram screening as the probably only way to save breast cancer patients while studies have demonstrated that this procedure does not reduce the mortality. Women are spared from dying from breast cancer within five years of diagnosis likely only if they have non-aggressive tumors, which would not create any problem to the patients in the first place. A new study found that mammogram screening does not save lives of patients with aggressive breast cancer no matter they are diagnosed early or not.

Professor Samuel S. Epstein, chairman of Cancer Prevention Coalition said on his website that it takes years for a tumor to develop into a breast cancer that is clinically significant. Mammogram screening finds tumors long before they pose any risk to the patients. The problem is that doctors do not know whether the tumors they are looking at would pose any risk to their patients' lives.

In any case, it may be wise for women to know that mammogram screening is a measure for damage control, but not a prevention tool. The real prevention needs to prevent the disease from developing in the first place. Good news is that most cases of breast cancers can be prevented by following a healthy diet and lifestyle, according to Dr. Professor Colin T Campbell, a distinguished nutrition professor at Cornell University.

The following is one piece that women may use to help them prevent breast cancer.

Second hand smoking raises breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women who themselves have never smoked tobacco products, according to a new study.

Active smoking has already been recognized as a risk factor for breast cancer. But the current study published in the Dec 2009 issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention finds that passive smoking or secondhand smoking poses the same risk.

Reynolds P of Northern California Cancer Center and colleagues examined data from 57,500 teachers who participated in the California Teachers Study. The subjects were nonsmokers for a lifetime and had no history of breast cancer.

Detailed information on passive smoke exposure by setting and by age of exposure to passive smoking was collected in 1997 (the year is corrected). During one decade of follow-up, 1,754 women were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer.

The researchers found the risk for postmenopausal women who were exposed to secondhand smoking at a low, medium and high level were increased by 17, 19 and 26 percent respectively.

For women exposed to secondhand smoking in adulthood, the risk for breast cancer was increased by 18 percent and for postmenopausal women, the risk was increased by 25 percent.

Reynolds et al. concluded "These results suggest that cumulative exposures to high levels of sidestream smoke may increase breast cancer risk among postmenopausal women who themselves have never smoked tobacco products."