Holly Atkinson Show Segment

Dr. Holly Atkinson, Exec VP, Reuter's Health Information Services Given: 5/22/96 at AARP Biennial Convention- Denver Colorado, 1996 Women's Health Staying Healthy “Breast cancer is one of the most crucial health issues facing older women today. Learn more about this disease and its treatment, as well as other special concerns that women have.”

The following is a portion of her presentation ...that their risk of breast cancer is increased. Now there have been interesting theories as to why that might be the case. Pregnancy may, in some way, help more fully develop the breast and, in fact, that may help protect, we just don't know why but clearly, women who delay child bearing or who never have children are at increased risk. As a matter of fact, if you look at your family history again, with delayed or no children, you can find 30% of women who have breast cancer are accounted for by those increased risks. So those two will help explain around 30%. We've known in the past that obesity increases this risk. Women who are heavy, obesity is described as 30% more than what your normal weight should be, are clearly at increased risk of breast cancer. Why? We have no idea. It may be something to do with the way the body metabolizes Estrogen. We also have gotten readings from studies that alcohol, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol four times a week or more, so this is four days a week or more, probably that’s a lot of alcohol for a woman, increases the risk of breast cancer. Again, we do not know why. And last but not least, you've all probably heard that Estrogen, Hormone Replacement Therapy increases the risk of Breast Cancer. I'm going to put that issue on hold, I want to come back to that and go to the issue of Hormone Replacement Therapy in a larger context because it has to do with Heart Disease as well. So we're going to hang on to that one. But there's new studies that came out this year that talks a lot about fat. First of all, you've probably all heard that maybe diet has something to do with Breast Cancer. You know, we've heard that fat does, fat doesn't, yes it does, no it doesn't. A good study came out in the New England Journal of Medicine in February of this year, just three months ago and it showed that fat in the diet does not appear to increase the risk of Heart Disease. Now that's rather interesting because on the other hand, obese women are at increased risk of Breast Cancer but fat alone is not the issue. So that story can teach us something there. It may have more to do with Estrogen than it does with fat. So pay attention to fat in the diet whereby it helps with many other diseases, particularly Heart Disease. It doesn't look like that's going to be a major factor in decreasing our risk of Breast Cancer. Now, what about stress. I bet you that a lot of you in the room, particularly those of you who have already had Breast Cancer or who have Breast Cancer now, believe that somehow the stress in your life, the depression that you've suffered has something to do with Breast Cancer. In fact, we saw another study this year published in March in Cancer which is a very good medical journal, and that study looked at thousands of women and looked at their different stress levels and whether or not they had had depression in life, in fact, it does not show that stress or depression has anything to do with an increased risk of Breast Cancer. So many times we beat ourselves up because we think, oh, you know, my life is stressed or I'm not coping well or, you know, I'm over tired, I haven't taken care of myself and we feel guilty that somehow that contributed to our Breast Cancer. There's no indication that that's the case so if you can go gentle on yourself and use this when you may be thinking that way or feeling guilty, indeed, the studies do not show that stress has anything to do with the increase of risk. Well, what about increase of risk..... I was intrigued by this. Another study that just got published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.....