Reuters reports that while this isn't the first study to find a link between diet and breast cancer, it is one of the first to look at the results by the presence or absence of estrogen and progesterone receptors. Breast cancer growth is stimulated by these two hormones. There has been an increase in recent years in the number of hormone receptor-positive cases of breast cancer, and lead study author Dr. Eunyoung Cho believes the trend may relate to increased consumption of red meat. This particular food can influence tumor growth via hormone receptors.
The study: The Harvard team analyzed data from 90,659 women, all of whom were 26 to 46 and participated in the Nurses' Health Study II. During 12 years of follow-up, 1,021 women developed invasive breast cancer.
The results: The more red meat a woman ate, the higher her risk of developing estrogen-positive and progesterone-positive breast cancers. There was no link between red meat and estrogen-negative or progesterone-negative cancers. Specifically, women who had more than 1.5 servings of red meat daily were 97 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than those who had three or fewer servings of red meat a week.
"Given that most of the risk factors for breast cancer are not easily modifiable, these findings have potential public health implications in preventing breast cancer and should be evaluated further," the authors wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
--From the Editors at Netscape
