[Paracelsus] Breast Cancer Risk Associated With Wealth - The Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project. Nature Reviews Cancer December 2005 (fwd)

[Guest guest]

I have a REAL problem with this *study/abstract*.

First of all, I lived on LI for 22 years. There was talk back then about

the dangers of the Brookhaven Power Plant. IT was not uncommon for the

water temp around the *plant* to be higher than other areas of Long Island

Sound.

Also, it is an almost unspoken rule, that you need to have that perfectly

manicured lawn, so of course they LIVED for the spring with their

herbicides etc.

If there was a single ant that required the can of Raid to spray the

entire house etc.

I have a copy of a letter from the Congressional Womens Caucas back in

December 2000, where they asked the EPA (Jeff Koplan, Director) to develop

a coordinated nationwide systm to track chronic diseases.

There is a direct reference to CA as follows:

" one of the most striking examples of the pervasiveness of environmentally

linked illnessesin women is breast cancer, where most cases have no

genetic predisposition or history of cancer. "

There is also a coincidence that I read somewhere, that even men who get

breast cancer seem to get it in the left breast. THey claimed that the

high concentration of Lymph nodes was the reason.

I have somewhere in my myriad of files that pesticides tend to be

lipophilic, so it would also seem to follow that pesticide usage could be

a factor also.

There was a big tado over the lobsters showing signs of environmental

pollutants a while ago. Which had hurt that industry for a while.

Now, this jewish women correlation is a far stretch. I would beleive this

if it was referencing the borough of Brooklyn as most were marrying within

their own faith. On the island there is more marriages of jews with

gentiles and therefore their *heritage* I think would be not be a factor.

Considering there are only a FEW REALLY WEALTHY areas on the island, it

just doesn't fly. What this *scientist* Winn completely overlooked was

the following: Most women on the island are career oriented and therefore

their choice to put off motherhood has nothing to do with wealth, it has

to do with trying to have it all. It is not unusual for

professional/career oriented women to want to have their career and

decided that motherhood could wait. With all the advances in medicine and

the ability to have safer pregnancies later in life, it can not be

construed as *wealthy*.

If that was the case, why isn't Bel Air, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Palm

Beach etc., with high breast cancer clusters? What about the beach

communites of southern California (Newport, Laguna etc.). Margate City on

the same island as Atlantic CIty, has the same expsoure to the Atlantic

Ocean and has a much HIGHER jewish population along with being a hell of a

lot WEALTHIER than the island. (I used to live in Margate and there is no

comparison between the 2).

Just another smoke screen to cover up the full impact of the environment

on human health.

Would be very interesting to see just who FUNDED Winn's study!

FWIW...here's the article....

Subject: [Paracelsus] Breast Cancer Risk Associated With Wealth - The Long

Island Breast Cancer Study Project. Nature Reviews Cancer December 2005

Winn DM. The Long Island Breast Cancer Study

Project. Nature Reviews Cancer December

2005;5:986-994.

http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v5/n12/abs/nrc1755.html

http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v5/n12/full/nrc1755.html

http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v5/n12/pdf/nrc1755.pdf

Perspective

Nature Reviews Cancer 5, 986-994 (December 2005) | doi:10.1038/nrc1755

Science and society: The Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project

Deborah M. Winn1 About the author

Top of page

Abstract

In the early 1990s, breast cancer advocates

petitioned the United States Congress to

investigate the high rates of breast cancer on

Long Island in the state of New York. The

resulting law led to the Long Island Breast

Cancer Study Project (LIBCSP) - more than ten

research projects designed to study the possible

causes of this increased incidence of cancer.

This project reported that there was no evidence

that environmental exposures were responsible.

Controversial from its start, the LIBCSP has had

an important role in efforts to understand the

reasons for the high rates of breast cancer in

some regions of the United States.

Breast Cancer Risk Associated With Wealth

Lifestyle Factors of Rich Women, Like Having Fewer Children, Up Their Risk

By JOY VICTORY

Dec. 1, 2005 - - Women who live in regions of the

United States known as breast cancer " hot spots "

may have an increased risk because of personal

wealth and not pollution or electrical wires,

researchers say.

Deborah Winn, a scientist with the National

Institutes of Health, states in the December

issue of the journal Nature Reviews Cancer that

the most likely reason that women in certain

communities -- such as Long Island or San

Francisco -- have increased breast cancer risk is

that those areas are populated by wealthy women.

Winn's article analyzes a series of studies

conducted by the Long Island Breast Cancer Study

Project in New York.

These women tend to have children later, have

fewer children, and are more likely to receive

costly replacement hormone therapy -- all of

which are linked to increased breast cancer risk.

Or, put another way, these women tend to have

more estrogen circulating in their bodies for

longer periods of time. Estrogen is highly

associated with breast cancer. The widely used

breast cancer drug Tamoxifen is used to suppress

circulating estrogen.

It had been theorized that women in Long Island

were at risk because they lived near

hazardous-chemical sites or powerful electrical

plants. This indeed may be at play, but

" measuring environmental exposures that occurred

in the past is very difficult, " Winn's article

notes.

Plus, lifestyle factors and genetics often are

involved, too, compounding the challenge of

finding one dominant risk factor.

For example, some clusters of breast cancer may

be due in part to a higher percentage of Jewish

women living on Long Island, said Tulane

University environmental health professor

. Women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent are

more likely to carry breast cancer gene

mutations. Many Ashkenazi Jews, or descendants of

Jews from Germany and Central Europe, live on

Long Island.

" I would expect that a GIS plot (map) of the

population density of Jewish women might

correspond well to the patterns of excess breast

cancer incidence shown in the national map, "

said.

However, it's important to note that the Nature

article does not rule out possible environmental

contributions to breast cancer risk, said

Wolff, acting director of Mount Sinai School of

Medicine's Division of Epidemiology.

Wolff said that environmental causes of breast

cancer risk may start 20 years to 40 years before

diagnosis, so studies that look for chemical

exposure at the time of a woman's diagnosis are

too late to catch the culprit.

The Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project is

now examining whether early life exposure

contributes to breast cancer risk.

In the meantime, most experts feel that the

biggest factors in cancer risk are personal, not

environmental, such as smoking and sexual

activity. Smoking is a known risk factor for lung

cancer, and cervical cancer is caused by a

sexually transmitted disease.

" I believe the take-home message to the public

should be that cancer risks in the U.S. today are

largely determined by personal habits, not

external environmental factors, " said H.

Hennekens, of the Epidemiology and Public Health

Department at the University of Miami School of

Medicine.

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

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