Earliest breast cancer risky for some women, study suggests

Almost 240,000 women receive diagnoses of invasive breast cancer each year. But the new study, published in JAMA Oncology, found that treatment beyond a lumpectomy didn’t improve survival rates.

About 60,000 women are diagnosed with DCIS each year, according to the American Cancer Society. She questioned whether those women who were treated and ended up dying of breast cancer anyway had been misdiagnosed. However, the current study conducted by researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston has said that consuming alcohol even in moderate amount can be harmful. In fact, a National Cancer Institute working group in 2013 recommended that the name “carcinoma” be removed from DCIS to highlight the fact that the lesions aren’t quite malignant, and therefore may not need the more aggressive treatment that cancers would warrant.

Many women are receiving unnecessary treatment for a condition that is sometimes called Stage 0 breast cancer, the findings of a new Canadian study suggest.

The researchers calculated the 10- and 20-year breast cancer-specific mortality rate for the women, comparing them with those of women among the general US population.

But the study has also found that though there is a minimal risk of all cancers, breast cancer risk have significantly increased, whether the woman is a smoker or not. A total of 517 women died of breast cancer following a DCIS diagnosis (average follow-up, 7.5 years; range, 0-23.9 years) without experiencing an in-breast invasive cancer prior to death.

The study reported that among men who had never smoked, there was no risk of alcohol-related cancers.

“This paper effectively redefines our understanding of the early stages of breast cancer and shows that the cancerous behavior is present very early on”, adds Dr. Narod.

The study revealed that men who said they drank alcohol moderately but on a daily basis had a higher risk of cancer than their peers who drank less or no alcohol only when they associated alcohol with cigarettes. “The other idea is that certain cancers, which are estrogen-related, such as breast – alcohol can also raise estrogen levels”. They are: the Health Professionals Follow-up Study for men and the Nurses’ Health Study for women. In addition to breast cancer, doctors looked for trends relating to colorectum, liver, oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus cancers.

Researchers say the mortality rate for women with DCIS is “too low to justify toxic therapy.” In his analysis, women who were treated with lumpectomy and radiation reduced their risk of recurrence from 4.9% to 2.5%.