The Online Community for Medical and Health Writers
-
anita khokhar
- Female
- delhi
- India
- Share
- Blog Posts
- Discussions (4)
- Groups (2)
- Photos (1)
- Photo Albums
- Videos
anita khokhar's Discussions
Breast cancer awareness initiative
3 Replies
Started this discussion. Last reply by anita khokhar Sep 24.
anita khokhar's Page
Gifts Received
anita khokhar has not received any gifts yet
Profile Information
- Hometown:
- delhi
- About Me:
- M.B.B.S from,Delhi and M.D. in Preventive and Social Medicine also from Delhi.Working with a medical college. Written a number of protocols, projects, manuscripts articles for newspapers, magazines.National level document on early detection of breast cancer.
- Website:
- http://www.dranita.net
- Specialty:
- public health
anita khokhar's Photos
About
Badge
© 2009 Created by Diego Pineda on Ning. Create a Ning Network!
Comment Wall (19 comments)
You need to be a member of Medical Writing Network to add comments!
Join this Ning Network
stay in touch
kudos for the book
in future count me in for nay awareness activities
plz see if the below information can be of any use to you. Else kindly disregard my messages.
Nadeem
There is substantial evidence that modifiable lifestyle factors play a significant role in the risk for primary breast cancer. As recently reported by Medscape Oncology, an updated version of the American Institute for Cancer Research/World Cancer Research Fund's report, Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective, reaffirmed that factors such as maintaining a healthy weight, exercising regularly, and limiting consumption of alcoholic beverages can reduce the risk of developing breast cancer.
However, information on lifestyle factors and their role in preventing contralateral disease in survivors is more limited. The authors point out that although adjuvant hormone therapy can lower the risk by 47%, little is known about other factors that are within the patient's control.
Reducing the risk for a second cancer is of considerable concern, they note, because breast cancer survivors have a risk of developing a contralateral breast cancer that is 2 to 6 times greater than that of women in the general population developing a first breast cancer. Therefore, identifying potentially modifiable risk factors is of public-health relevance and of individual importance to breast cancer survivors, the authors note.
"But 1 issue in our study was that while some of the smokers stopped smoking, few of the drinkers changed their drinking habits, and few of the obese women lost weight, so we could not directly assess the impact that changing these habits had on reducing risk of a second breast cancer," lead author Christopher I. Li, MD, PhD, associate member of the Public Health Sciences Division at the Hutchinson Center, told Medscape Oncology.
"That said, the evidence regarding obesity and alcohol use and risk of a first breast cancer does suggest that reducing body weight and reducing alcohol consumption does lower risk of first breast cancer, so I would expect that changing these things could also reduce the risk of second breast cancer," he added.
Obesity, Alcohol Use, and Smoking Increase Risk
In this study, Dr. Li and colleagues evaluated the effect of obesity, alcohol consumption, and smoking on risk for second primary invasive contralateral breast cancer among breast cancer survivors.
The cohort consisted of 365 women who were diagnosed with an estrogen-receptor (ER)-positive first primary invasive breast cancer and a second primary contralateral invasive breast cancer, and 726 matched controls who were diagnosed with only an ER-positive first primary invasive breast cancer.
Information regarding obesity, alcohol use, and smoking was acquired from medical-record reviews and from interviews with the participants. The researchers then used conditional logistic regression to assess the association of these 3 factors and the risk for a second cancer.
They found that compared with women who had a body mass index (BMI) lower than 25.0 kg/m2, those with a BMI of 30.0 kg/m2 or above had a higher risk for contralateral breast cancer (odds ratio [OR], 1.4; 95% CI, 1.0 to 2.1).
The consumption of alcohol was also positively related to an increased risk for a second cancer (OR, 1.9; 95% CI, 1.1 to 3.2) when evaluated at both the first diagnosis of breast cancer and during the interval between first breast cancer diagnosis and reference date.
In similar fashion, current smokers had an elevated risk for contralateral breast cancer (OR, 2.2; 95% CI, 1.2 to 4.0) at first breast cancer diagnosis and at reference date, compared with women who had never smoked. The association between smoking and cancer risk did not vary by pack-years, the authors note. A small number of women were smokers at the time of their first diagnosis but quit by their reference date (14 patients and 29 control subjects), and this did not seem to influence the risk of developing a second breast cancer.
This observation suggests that recent smoking is the most relevant to risk, the authors note. "There were also too few women who were exsmokers and who started smoking again after their first breast cancer diagnosis for us to be able to assess this aspect," said Dr. Li.
Although i am still trying to understand and make good use of this platform.
Warm Regards
Anil
anil@anilaggrawal.com
View All Comments