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Written By: Admin | Updated : October 3, 2013 11:32 AM IST
If you're a woman and not a mother yet, be warned that the more alcohol you drink, higher are the chances of contracting breast cancer. According to a new study by the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, if a woman consumes one drink a day between when she gets her first period and her first full-term pregnancy, she increases her risk of breast cancer by 13 per cent.
The researchers also found that for every bottle of beer, glass of wine or shot of liquor consumed daily, a young woman increases her risk of proliferative benign breast disease by 15 per cent. Although such lesions are noncancerous, their presence increases breast cancer risk by as much as 500 per cent, said first author of the study, Ying Liu, a School of Medicine instructor in the Division of Public Health Sciences. The findings are based on a review of the health histories of 91,005 mothers enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study II from 1989 to 2009.
Researchers didn't consider the effects of adolescent and early adulthood drinking on women who didn't have a full-term pregnancy because not enough were represented among those studied, Liu said. Breast tissue cells are particularly susceptible to cancer-causing substances as they undergo rapid proliferation during adolescence and later. Adding to the risk is the lengthening time frame between the average age of a girl's first menstrual cycle and the average age of a woman's first full-term pregnancy.
'Reducing drinking to less than one drink per day, especially during this time period, is a key strategy to reducing lifetime risk of breast cancer,' he said. The study is published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
What is breast cancer?
Breast cancer is a type of cancer originating from the breast tissues. Both men and women can be afflicted by it though it's rarer in men. Along with cervical cancer it's one of the most common types of cancer that afflicts women. One of the major issues with breast cancer is that it is often not detected soon enough. This is due to low awareness about the disease. Detecting it early can significantly reduce the death risk.
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