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Refusal of alcohol will prevent breast cancer?
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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The researchers found that teenage girls who consumed alcohol in a family already had cases of breast cancer, benign breast tumors appeared twice as often as those who do not drink.
Benign breast diseases alone are not dangerous, but they are a prerequisite for the development of breast cancer in the future.
The author of the study, Kathryn Burke of Boston, says teenage girls and young women whose families have already had breast cancer cases should know that alcohol consumption increases the risk of developing benign breast diseases and, in the future, breast cancer.
Burke and her colleagues, whose work was published in the journal Cancer, watched over 7,000 girls since 1996, when they were between the ages of 9 and 15, until 2007. 17% of the girls had a mother, aunt or grandmother with breast cancer.
The level of benign breast diseases among drinking girls (about one alcoholic beverage per day) at the age of 22 was 3.1%, compared to non-drinkers, who had 1.3%.
This is not the first study to prove the association of alcohol with breast cancer.
Earlier this month, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that 2.8% of non-drinking women will develop breast cancer in the next 10 years, compared to 3.5% of women who consume up to 13 alcoholic beverages in a week.
However, independent expert Dr. Stephen Narod claimed that the advice to give up alcohol is unlikely to significantly reduce this risk. "If it's true that heredity and alcohol together increase the risk of benign breast disease and breast cancer, I think the maximum number of breast cancers could be prevented by less than 1%." Is there any prospect for such an approach? ". And since alcohol is associated with a reduced risk of developing heart attacks, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from this study, says Narod.
There are several risk factors for breast cancer, such as heredity, the presence of seals in the mammary gland, age and alcohol consumption. "These cancer risk factors have been scientifically proven," Narod said. "But that does not mean that we can exclude breast cancer by eliminating all known risk factors."
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