Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Harvard
University have claimed that girls and young women who indulge in boozing raise
their risk of benign (noncancerous) breast disease.
Benign breast disease increases the risk for developing breast cancer.
"Our study clearly showed that the risk of benign breast disease increased with
the amount of alcohol consumed in this age group," says Graham Colditz, MD, DrPH,
associate director of prevention and control at the Siteman Cancer Center at
Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. "The study
is an indication that alcohol should be limited in adolescence and early adult
years and further focuses our attention on these years as key to preventing
breast cancer later in life."
About 80 per cent of breast lumps are benign. But these benign breast lesions
can be a step in a pathway leading from normal breast tissue to invasive breast
cancer, so the condition is an important marker of breast cancer risk, Colditz
indicates.
To
reach the conclusion, researchers studied girls aged 9 to 15 years at the
study's start and followed them using health surveys from 1996 to 2007. A total
of 6,899 participants reported on their alcohol consumption and whether they had
ever been diagnosed with benign breast disease. The participants were part of
the Growing Up Today Study of more than 9,000 girls from all 50 states who are
daughters of participants in the Nurses' Health Study II, one of the largest and
longest-running investigations of factors that influence women's health.
The study showed that the more alcohol consumed, the more likely the
participants were to have benign breast disease. Girls and young women who drank
six or seven days a week were 5.5 times more likely to have benign breast
disease than those who didn't drink or who had less than one drink per week.
Participants who reported drinking three to five days per week had three times
the risk.
The participants who were diagnosed with benign breast disease on average drank
more often, drank more on each occasion and had an average daily consumption
that was two times that of those who did not have benign breast disease. They
also had more episodes of binge drinking.
The study was published in the May issue of Pediatrics (online April 12,
2010)
