Julia B. Greer - The Anti-Breast Cancer Cookbook: How to Cut Your Risk with the Most Powerful, Cancer-Fighting Foods

For Diane White

Chapter 1

Much has been written about diet and cancer. In 1981 Richard Doll and Richard Peto published a comprehensive review discussing avoidable causes of cancer mortality in the United States and suggested that diet accounted for about 35 percent of cancer deaths; smoking accounted for a similar percentage. Since then, thousands of studies have assessed how various foods and nutrients relate to cancer risk. A constant stream of media on the subject has made people more aware than ever. Well talk a lot about food and cancer in this book, but to have a full understanding of how dietary choices might impact breast cancer risk, its valuable to know the basics about breast cancer. Being familiar with the various forms of breast cancer and their treatments will help you to see how healthy eating fits into the bigger picture of cancer prevention.

Incidence and Prevalence

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer diagnosed in women in the United States and is second only to lung cancer as a leading cause of cancer death in females. The National Cancer Institute estimates that in 2011, 230,480 U.S. women were diagnosed with breast cancer and 39,520 women died from it. According to the American Cancer Society, rates of breast cancer increased between 1994 and 1999 and then decreased by about 2 percent each year for the years 19992006. The decreases in annual incidence were likely the consequence of the 2002 publication of results of the Womens Health Initiative study, which found that combined estrogen and progestin hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increased the risk of breast cancer, as well as heart disease, stroke, and blood clots, in older women. Many women stopped taking postmenopausal hormones after this studys results became widely known because doctors were more reluctant to prescribe them. As an aside, other studies have shown that estrogen-only HRT, which is prescribed for postmenopausal women who do not have a uterus, might be protective against breast cancer. There was also a drop in rates of mammography during these years, which may have delayed the diagnosis of breast cancer for some women, thereby lowering perceived incidence. Rates of breast cancer are higher in countries that have been industrialized for a long time and lower in more recently industrialized countries. For instance, in East Asia (China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) the incidence of breast cancer is about 21 cases per 100,000 compared with 85 per 100,000 in western Europe and 124 per 100,000 in the United States.

The most recent statistics for breast cancer prevalence in the United States are from January 1, 2008, when approximately 2.6 million women had a history of breast cancer. The figure includes anyone still living on January 1, 2008, who had been diagnosed with cancer of the breast at any point prior to January 1, 2008, and it encompasses individuals with active disease and those who were cured of the disease.