While billions of research dollars have been spent on screening, treating and trying to cure breast cancer, still relatively little is known about its causes.
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When Ida Washington received a letter inviting her to participate in a women’s health study to explore the environmental roots of breast cancer, she didn’t think twice. Her mother was diagnosed with the disease nearly 40 years ago, and since then, it has been a terrifying mystery she has yearned to unravel.
Washington was just a teenager when the lump was found on her mother’s left breast. In the years that followed, as her mother’s cancer went into remission, she began to wonder what caused it. “My mother didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink. Breast cancer didn’t run in the family,” she said.
Ida’s mother, Willie Mae Washington, now 92, participated in the first generation of a scientific study that has endured for more than half a century to investigate whether environmental exposures may trigger breast cancer. Now Ida Washington, 52, is continuing the legacy as part of its second generation.
The two women are among the more than 15,000 mothers, daughters and granddaughters in the San Francisco Bay Area enrolled in a project known as the Child Health and Development Studies, launched in 1959. Tens of thousands of samples of the women’s blood are stored, providing more than 50 years of continuous data on health outcomes and environmental exposures.
Scientists tap into this unique trove as they struggle to figure out what role environmental exposures play in the development of diseases such as breast cancer.
“These women are a national treasure,” said Barbara Cohn, director of the Child Health and Development Studies and Three Generations follow-up study, based in Berkeley, Calif. “They hold the key to understanding the risks.”
While billions of research dollars have been spent on screening, treating and trying to cure breast cancer, still relatively little is known about its causes. One in every eight women today will contract the disease during her lifetime. Genes account for only a small number of cases, 5 to 10 percent. Known risk factors include age, obesity and low physical activity.
Washington, her mother, and other members of the Bay Area study are uniquely poised to help researchers answer the why’s of breast cancer and other diseases afflicting women.
Over the years, this group of women and their children – known in scientific jargon as a cohort – has helped scientists understand how diseases can start even before birth and may pass from one generation to the next – not just through genes, but also by things in their environment.
Funded largely by the National Institutes of Health, hundreds of scientific studies have been published about these women since the 1960s.
One of the more groundbreaking findings provided a clue that smoking during pregnancy could harm the fetus. Also, based on these women, scientists discovered that exposure to the now-banned pesticide DDT during a mother’s pregnancy could decrease a daughter’s ability to become pregnant and increase a son’s risk of testicular cancer. New findings are expected to be published soon.
There are no research cohorts like it in the country. In fact, it may be the only one of its kind in the entire world.
The study group is “extremely valuable, almost unique,” said Shanna Swan, an environmental health scientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York who is not involved with the California research.
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8 Comments
Add CommentFinally, some interest in breast cancer causes. Cedric Garland, of UCSD, has been proposing for some time a theory that seems so logical that it's startling that it has had so little consideration. Go to grassrootshealthdotorg to read his scholarly discussion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNew cells are being created in all of us all the time. As new cells are generated, some with genetic imperfections, there is a perpetual tension that an imperfect cell, while not suited for the tissue function it is in, will be able to reproduce in an uncontrolled manner. A cell can either survive because it is a "good liver cell" or "because it can reproduce faster than the surrounding cells." Fast cell division is of no value to the liver, but is great for the imperfect cell. Fast, uncontrolled cell growth -- sounds like the start of cancer.
Apoptosis, programmed cell death, is the body's way to rid itself of those imperfect cells, and apoptosis requires intracellular communication to be effective. Vitamin D has been well demonstrated to be essential for that communication and guess what, we are almost all of us Vit D deficient. The "naturally occurring" serum level for Vit D is 80-100 ng/ml, yet the IOM thinks 20 is "enough". I've yet to see a scholarly study of Vit D that considers the "natural" level found in individuals exposed to adequate sunlight as desirable.
We have just started to realize how pervasive the chemicals, nuclear fallout, air pollution, water pollution damaging marine life are that affect mankind. Overpopulation will only
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismake conditions worsen over time as resource dwindles and less favorable outcomes prevail.
I am surprised that the article does not mention one of the clearest factors influencing breast cancer risk - later first pregnancy and lower number of pregnancies. These are both features of modern developed societies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is feasible that use of synthetic pregnancy hormones, as used in the contraceptive pill, might be used to simulate the effects of pregnancy and thus protect against breast cancer. The benefit would have to be balanced against potential harmful effects of taking hormones.
very helpfull article, thanks a lot
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The government in their ignorance has been convinced to add the metal iron to all our foods. This is proving to be a big mistake.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Red meat, MeIQx, and dietary iron elevated the risk of invasive breast cancer, but there was no linear trend in the association except for dietary iron."
Has anyone looked into the effects of Genetically Modified Foods? Monsanto is such a major and powerful organization that people are afraid to investigate what is put into our foods (growth hormones)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisResearching epigenetic causes of breast cancer- or any similarly hormone-influenced cancers ( prostate cancer rates are pretty parallel to breast cancer rates!) has been long overdue. Epidemiological studies, e,g, Professor Colin Campbell's ground-breaking, 30 years' 'China Study' have shown that diet plays a very significant role:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe highest breast & prostate cancer rates have been in countries with the highest meat& dairy consumption!
This makes sense now: Cows are accumulating DDT from the grasses they have eaten over their lifetime, and are constantly doped with bovine growth hormones for maximum fertility rates and milk yield, 10 times more than would be natural.
We are getting this toxic cocktail with every steak and cheese we have eaten. Bon appetit!
Youthevity.com
Post a serious article and every armchair scientist spouts their pet theory based on partial understanding of something they once read somewhere. The idea behind research is that you do the work and *then* decide what the results indicate. You don't decide the results and then do the work in a way to guarantee your pet theory is supported.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI used to believe a lot of the garbage I read until I figured out that none of it was real science and most results were explained by the placebo effect.