Update: Drinking green tea helps prevent breast cancer

This is to add an important message to the report we released early today.  While it is evident that drinking green tea may likely help prevent breast cancer and other types of malignancies, we'd like readers to know that the bottled green tea sold on the market is not the product you should use to have an protective effect against breast cancer.  That is because studies have demonstrated that the bottled tea in many cases contain little active green component EGCG, which promotes apoptosis. One will need to brew their own green tea using quality dried green tea leaves.

The following is the original report.

In the pink month - the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we publish a report below to share with readers a study that suggests drinking green tea may help prevent breast cancer and recurrence of the disease.

Adeyemi A. Ogunleye at Harvard School of Public Health and colleagues reviewed previous studies and found there was an inverse association between drinking green tea and risk of breast cancer recurrence.

Green tea is commonly consumed beverage in Asian countries like Japan and China and it promotes apoptosis - programmed cell death in cancer cells in laboratory studies conducted by Rutgers University researchers and others.

The current study is a review based on two studies of breast cancer recurrence and seven studies of breast cancer incidence associated with drinking green tea published between 1998 and 2009.

Drinking more than 3 cups of green tea a day was correlated with 27 percent reduced risk of breast cancer recurrence, the review study showed. The risk reduction was statistically significant. 

An analysis of case-control studies of breast cancer incidence showed also an inverse association between drinking green tea and breast cancer incidence. The risk reduction was up to 19 percent, which was statistically significant.

However, cohort studies did not show an association between drinking green tea and breast cancer incidence.

"Available epidemiologic evidence supports the hypothesis that increased green tea consumption may be inversely associated with risk of breast cancer recurrence," the authors wrote in the study report. 

"The association between green tea consumption and breast cancer incidence remains unclear based on the current evidence," they added.

The study was published in Epidemiology.

Breast cancer is diagnosed in more than 170,000 women and kill about 50,000 women each year in the United States, according to American Cancer Society. The disease will be diagnosed eventually in one in 7 women in their lifetime.

Many lifestyle parameters have been found potentially able to modify the risk of developing breast cancer and prevent the disease from recurring or prevent patients from dying of the disease.

More reports will be published here in the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month to help readers better understand the risk of breast cancer risk and how to prevent it.  Many doctors believe that  breast cancer in many cases is preventable.

Jimmy Downs