Teen drinking increases the risk for breast cancer

By Candy Lashkari

What are the chances of you developing breast cancer if you have been drinking alcohol regularly as a teenager? Very high indeed as per the findings of a study called “Growing Up Today” conducted on 6,899 women from the time they were 9 to 15 year old till they turned 18 to 27 years old.

The study published in the online journal Pediatrics found that teenager girls who drank nearly every day were five times more likely to develop benign breast tumors that those who drank less than once a week.

Catherine Berkey, a biostatistician at Harvard Medical School in Boston who is the co-author of the study said, “Our study may suggest that teen drinking increases the risk for breast cancer, whether in all females or in those who go on to develop BBD, but longer-term follow-up is certainly required.”

It is also the first study which has collected the data on alcohol consumption during adolescence unlike other studies which relied on the memory of participants for their teen drinking habits.

So what can you do to reduce the risk of developing breast cancer? Take calcium and multi- vitamins regularly as per Dr Jaime Matta, a professor at Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico. The study which was presented at the American Association for Cancer Research yesterday in Washington D.C. found that the multivitamins worked better together than individual vitamins.

The authors studied 268 women with breast cancer and 457 without the disease all based in Puerto Rico.They also measured the ability of the women’s DNA to repair itself. This is considered essential for cancer to be cured. The researchers are also working on a new way of measuring the DNA repair capacity.

Dr Matta said, “We're developing new technology that would make measuring DNA repair capacity more inexpensive, faster and easier to do.” This would give a boost to their plan to use DNA repair capacity as a marker for breast cancer risk, similar to how cholesterol levels are used as a marker to predict risk for heart disease.

Understanding the cancer mutations will go a long way in fighting them. That is why Rick Wilson and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis have been studying the four DNA samples from a 44 year old woman who died of breast cancer with a year of being diagnosed. This patient was the first African American woman to have her entire genome sequenced. She had triple negative cancer which was negative for estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and HER-2. Researchers found 50 separate mutations in her DNA samples of which 20 helped to spread the cancer.