Smoking young women have significantly high breast cancer risk: study
BEIJING – Young women who smoke have a significantly high risk of a common type of breast cancer, according to a study quoted by media reports Tuesday.
The link between smoking by young women and the risk of developing breast cancer was found by Dr. Christopher Li from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in United States.
For this study, Li and his colleagues examined 778 women aged between 20 and 44 diagnosed with strogen receptor-positive type breast cancer and 182 with triple-negative type breast cancer during the period of 2004 to 2010.
Their data was also compared with those of 938 cancer-free women.
The researchers found that young women who had smoked a pack of cigarettes per day for at least 10 years had a 60 percent increased risk of estrogen receptor positive breast cancer.
Also, young women who had ever smoked were about 30 percent more likely to develop any type of breast cancer, compared to women who had never smoked.
Geoffrey Kabat, who has also researched the effects of smoking on the risk of breast cancer from Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York says: “we know smoking is bad for you and the earlier you smoke and the more often you smoke the worse off you’re going to be in terms of many outcomes, but the role of smoking in breast cancer is not clear”.
Source: Xinhua
Published: 12 Feb 2014
Category: Features, Health alert
