Alcohol raises breast cancer risk in HRT users
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Women taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) should avoid drinking alcohol because it can raise their risk of developing the most common kind of breast cancer, Swedish scientists said on Tuesday.
Researchers at the Karolinska Institute said they saw an increased incidence of estrogen positive breast cancer, the most common type of disease, especially among women who drank alcohol and took hormones to relieve symptoms of the menopause.
“Our results suggest that women taking hormones should avoid alcohol,” said Professor Alicja Wolk, whose team has published their findings in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The journal will come out on Wednesday.
“For those women who have to take hormones, what they can do is avoid alcohol so it will not have a multiplier effect on the risk for cancer,” she added.
Many women have stopped or avoid taking HRT after research published in 2002 showed it could raise the risk of heart attack, stroke, breast cancer and other serious conditions.
The Karolinska study also looked further at how alcohol in general increased the risk of breast cancer.
Wolk said the research showed that the increased risk was also for estrogen receptor positive breast cancer, not for the less common estrogen receptor negative type.
Wolk and her colleagues evaluated data on alcohol consumption collected from 1987 to 1990 and again in 1997 from 51,847 postmenopausal women. By mid-2004, 1,188 breast cancer patients were identified.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide.
More than a million cases occur each year and about 400,000 women die of the disease, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France.
Having a family history of breast cancer, an early puberty, late menopause, obesity and not having children can increase the risk of developing the illness.
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