Health News Update

Breast Cancer Research Findings

Recently the latest health news and research findings in the press have revealed articles on the causes of breast cancer. The latest news in breast cancer research states that both pollution in the environment and the use of synthetic hormones in hormone replacement therapy are the causes of breast cancer. Really, this isn’t news at all because in 2002, the Womens Health Initiative found that synthetic hormone use increased the risk of deadly breast cancer among other health risks, and it has always been suspected that pollution in the environment causes not only breast cancer but other types of cancer and birth defects.

The following article, speaks to the issue of the use of synthetic hormones in hormone replacement therapy are for my readers concerned about breast cancer news and research. This article on Hormone Replacement Therapy as a cause of breast cancer comes from the NYDailyNews.com.

Hormone replacement therapy caused more advanced, deadlier breast cancer: AMA

Women who took hormone replacement pills had more advanced breast cancers and were more likely to die from them than women who took a dummy pill, raising new concerns about the commonly prescribed drugs, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to report more breast cancer deaths among women taking hormone replacement therapy. And it contradicts prior studies that suggest women taking the drugs had less aggressive, easier-to-treat breast cancers.

HRT as a cause of breast cancer

“As opposed to the prevailing thought of two years ago, that cancers associated with estrogen plus progesterone would be favorable and not much of a problem, we are actually showing they are associated with an increased risk of death from breast cancer,” Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

The findings include 11 years of follow-up from the Women’s Health Initiative study, which in 2002 found women who took estrogen plus progestins (synthetic progesterone) for five years had higher rates of ovarian cancer, breast cancer, strokes and other health problems.

Sales of U.S. market leader Wyeth’s combined estrogen plus progesterone pill Prempro have fallen by about 50 percent since 2001 to around $1 billion a year. Wyeth is now owned by Pfizer.

Chlebowski’s team analyzed data on the more than 12,000 women in the study. They found twice as many taking HRT died from breast cancer — 2.6 per 10,000 per year versus 1.3 per 10,000 women per year — compared to women who took a placebo.

Nearly 24 percent of the breast cancer patients who took HRT had tumors that had spread to the lymph notes, compared with 16 percent of women taking placebos.

“All the scary cancers with unfavorable prognoses were also increased,” Chlebowski said, citing increases in aggressive forms of breast cancer, and not just estrogen-fed cancers that are easier to treat.

“And then for the first time we show deaths from breast cancer are significantly increased as well,” he said.

Pfizer said in a statement the company stands behind Prempro’s current labeling, which advises doctors to prescribe the drug at the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible period of time.

But even that may be risky, suggests Dr. Peter Bach of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who wrote a commentary in the same journal.

Doctors can only be guessing that taking the pills at a lower dose and for a shorter time would be less harmful, Bach said in a telephone interview.

Doctors “should be aware that this approach has not been proven in rigorous clinical trials,” Bach wrote.

“As a science-based company, we take this analysis seriously,” Pfizer said in a statement.

“It is important to view the data in the full context of both the symptoms of menopause as well as the extensive body of information — developed over more than 60 years — on the known benefits and risks of hormone therapy.”

Doctors note that the average age of the women in the Women’s Health Initiative study was 63, several years past menopause, and say the findings may not apply to women taking other forms of HRT (such as bioidentical hormones), or to those starting HRT immediately at the time of menopause.

Women Smokers Prone to Dangerous Blood Vessel Condition

Risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm is 8 times higher than in nonsmokers, study says
By Ed Edelson

Women who smoke are eight times more likely to suffer a potentially fatal rupture of the body’s largest artery, or require surgery to repair the weakening that can cause such a rupture, than nonsmokers.

That’s the conclusion of the latest data from the Women’s Health Initiative, the landmark trial most noted for the 2002 finding that hormone replacement therapy increases the risk of heart problems.

The new finding on the condition called abdominal aortic aneurysm comes from an analysis led by Dr. Frank Lederle, an internist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Minneapolis and a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota.

“My particular interest is abdominal aortic aneurysm,” Lederle said. “Most previous studies of it have been in men, so this is an opportunity to look at a very large study in women.”

The aorta is the main artery carrying blood from the heart. An aneurysm is a weakening or ballooning of the blood vessel, a process that can take years to develop, often without symptoms. Some 15,000 Americans die each year when an abdominal aortic aneurysm ruptures, 40 percent of them women.

The link between smoking and aneurysm was not unexpected, Lederle said. “No one would have expected otherwise,” he said. “There is a very strong association in men as well.”

It is a strong relationship. Even women who gave up smoking had a fourfold higher incidence of rupture than women who never smoked. What really interested Lederle was the finding that women with diabetes were less likely to have a rupture or surgery. It’s not at all clear why that should be so, he said.

“Diabetes makes the arteries stiff, so that might be protective,” Lederle said. “But other studies show that stiff arteries lead to abdominal aortic aneurysm. What we are going to need is a complete biochemical explanation.”

The new study, published online Oct. 15 in the British Medical Journal, also found that hormone replacement therapy reduced the risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm.

“We expected to see it, but the relationship was surprisingly strong,” Lederle said. “We certainly are not going to recommend that it [hormone replacement therapy] be used for that purpose.”
The various findings “are of interest to guide future research,” he added. “We would hope to develop a specific test for this condition.”

Dr. David G. Neschis, a vascular surgeon and an associate professor of surgery at the University of Maryland, said the biggest impact of the new study “will be to raise awareness about the importance of abdominal aortic aneurysm in women. The focus has been on men, and so, it is not screened for as frequently in women.”

“There are a huge number of undiagnosed aneurysms in women,” Neschis added. “Most now are identified as incidental findings, when a woman has a CT scan of the gall bladder or magnetic resonance imaging for back trouble. Perhaps women should be screened more aggressively.”

Screening is especially advisable for women who smoke, have high blood pressure or a family history of the condition, Neschis said. Age is also a factor, he said, since, “if you have it, it grows slowly over time.”

Source:  www.caremark.com