Posted on 10/05/2007 2:32:22 AM PDT by rhema
A new study published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons yesterday finds that abortion is the best predictor of whether women will contract breast cancer. Abortion also is a better indicator of future breast cancer issue than six other commonly used factors. Patrick Carroll of the Pension and Population Research Institute in London conducted this new study and showed that countries with higher abortion rates, such as England & Wales, could expect a substantial increase in breast cancer incidence.
"Induced abortion is found to be the best predictor, and fertility is also a useful predictor," he writes. "The increase in breast cancer incidence appears to be best explained by an increase in abortion rates, especially nulliparous abortions, and lower fertility."
He found that, when abortion rates are low such as in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, a smaller increase is expected.
And in nations experiencing a decline in abortions, like Denmark and Finland, a similar decline in breast cancer is anticipated.
Carroll used the same mathematical model for a previous forecast of numbers of breast cancers in future years for England & Wales. He based the model on cancer data up to 1997 that has proved quite accurate for predicting cancers observed in years 1998 to 2004.
In four nations -- England & Wales, Scotland, Finland and Denmark -- he discovered a social gradient unlike that for other cancers. He found upper class and upwardly mobile women have more breast cancer than lower-income women.
Carroll suggests that the known preference for abortion in this class might explain the phenomenon. Women pursuing higher educations and professional careers often delay marriage and childbearing. Abortions before the birth of a first child are highly carcinogenic, he explained.
Carroll used national data from nations believed to have "nearly complete abortion counts." Therefore, his study is not affected by recall bias.
Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, commented on the new study in a statement sent to LifeNews.com.
"It's time for scientists to admit publicly what they already acknowledge privately among themselves that abortion raises breast cancer risk," she said.
Malec said such scientists need to "stop conducting flawed research to protect the medical establishment from massive medical practice lawsuits."
Read the new study at jpands.org.
Ping
What correlation does this have with women who give birth but don’t breastfeed?
Remember to line from the old commercial? “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”
“What about still-births? Spontaneous abortions?”
Those are excellent questions. Two weeks ago a young 24 year old married friend of my daughter’s had a routine pregnancy checkup with her doctor. She was five months along. Sadly, she was informed that they couldn’t find a heartbeat and it was determined that the baby was dead. She was given the medication to induce labor and gave birth the next day to a very small(10 oz.) perfectly formed little boy. They will do an autopsy to try to discover what happened. Needless to say, many tears have fallen from all our eyes over this loss. I would hate to think that this tragedy could further impact her health somewhere down the line.
I found some info here:
How is breast feeding related to breast cancer?
http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/help/default.asp?page=5105
Breast feeding can protect you against developing breast cancer. We don’t know exactly how breast feeding is protective but, after the publication of a large Cancer Research UK study in 2002, we know that it definitely is.
The study compared breast feeding history in women who had breast cancer with women who hadn’t. It was a very large study, involving the histories of 50,000 women with breast cancer and nearly 100,000 women without.
The longer the women had fed for during their lifetime, the less likely they were to get breast cancer. According to the researchers, this was a very striking finding. They made sure that the women’s age; menopausal status, ethnic origin, number of births and their age at the birth of their first child were all taken into account. Breast feeding still lowered breast cancer risk by 4.3% for every year of feeding. There is also a 7% reduction in risk of breast cancer for each child born.
A 4% lowering of risk doesn’t sound much but, as breast cancer is quite a common disease in developed countries, breast feeding every child for an extra 6 months would mean about 1,000 fewer cases of breast cancer in Britain each year.
This research is a major step in explaining the difference in breast cancer rates between the Western world and developing countries. In developing countries, women tend to have more children and to feed each of them for much longer. Interestingly, in Japan 90% of women who have children breast feed. Japan is often talked about in relation to the incidence of breast cancer because, although it is obviously a developed country, breast cancer rates are much lower than they are in Western countries. Usually, people talk about diet as the explanation for this. But it may well be cultural differences in feeding babies that explains it.
These findings are important for helping us to prevent future cases of breast cancer. But the research may also help us in developing treatments. Any new knowledge about how breast cancer is triggered can help scientists to develop treatments to tackle it.
Researchers are now looking into whether breast feeding can help to protect women who carry one of the breast cancer faulty genes - BRCA1 and BRCA2. One Swedish study, published in 2004, concluded that breast feeding may reduce breast cancer risk for BRCA1 carriers who breast fed for more than a year in total, but there was no difference for BRCA2 carriers. There are other studies and it isn’t possible to draw definite conclusions from just this one study.
AAAAAA-OOOO-Gah! BS Alert! BS Alert! Don your hip boots and goggles!
Interesting study. I’ll give my sons each an extra hug when they get home from school today!
The model may have predictive value in a population without explaining or predicting a particular individual's cancer. After all, breast cancer existed before abortion became so prevalent; there is an underlying rate of these cancers within our populations. It is also possible that all the women you know who have had breast cancer haven't told you their abortion histories. It's not a typical topic of conversation, at least among my women friends. Statistically, I'm sure I know women who have had abortions, but I've never had a conversation where it's been admitted to me.
My wife and I have been through the same situation a couple times. It sucks in a way worse than anything can suck. Prayers.
The increased rates are stunning but there are so many environmental factors and drug choices. The two women I knew who died of breast cancer in their 30's both took massive fertility drugs, had successful pregnancies, and were diagnosed with breast cancer within a year of the babies' births. How do they fit into this model?
They could have, I doubt it but they could have, yes. One was forced by her father to put her baby up for adoption when she was a teenager (back in the 50s). She never had any others, and she was against abortion. Two others were my great aunts, one who died in the 50s and one who had a mastectomy at age 80 a few years ago.
How do they know then, that the women in the study who say they never had an abortion are telling the truth?
How about the correlation between diet and breast cancer? Asian women (in Asia) who ate a typically low fat Asian diet (lots of vegetables, rice, little meat, no frying in fats) had very low rates of breast cancer. With the introduction of Western foods, rates have dramatically increased.
I’d love to see the causality of his claims.
Oh wait....this isn’t “research”...this is a “study”....nothing to see here, move along folks.
This study is specific to induced abortions, which are not stillbirths or miscarriages. From what I've read over the years, the risk is not thought to be the same. In the case of stillbirth, this would make sense to me, because the breast tissue has undergone all the normal changes associated with childbirth, and not been interrupted partway through. I worry about the effect of miscarriage, but in all my miscarriages, the transition from apparently normal pregnancy to miscarriage was gradual. It was a sense over a couple of weeks that things just weren't moving forward, confirmed later by ultrasound. I never felt like the bottom dropped out of my hormone levels or that there was a drastic change in how I felt. Without knowing the exact mechanism for cancer development, I tend to think that a natural winding down of pregnancy hormones has to be different in its effect from a sudden hormonal change precipitated by traumatic fetal death.
Maybe there was more breast cancer in the past that remained undiagnosed. Maybe it would have developed in a certain percentage of women anyway had they lived longer, much like prostate cancer showing up because men are living longer.
My gut feeling is that it correlates to birth control pills (particularly the higher doses given years ago), perhaps in conjunction with smoking or secondhand smoke.
If you read the study, this will be a bit more clear. The statistics were gathered in countries in which the abortion statistics are thought to be more complete. The US and France were left out because abortions tend to be under-reported. Reading between the lines, they studied countries with more socialized medical systems and less medical privacy. No doubt there are errors, omissions, and additional factors which could be influencing the outcome. This isn't an easy subject to study. There can be a long induction time for cancer, and there are a lot of political sensitivities and ethical considerations. I'm glad to see someone trying to get a handle on this connection, difficult though it may be.
This article does not say that every woman who has breast cancer had an abortion. It does say, however, that having an abortion greatly increases a woman’s risk of getting breast cancer.
If we know that abortion is a cancer risk factor, shouldn’t women be made aware of that fact? If we can lower the incidence of breast cancer by decreasing the number of abortions, isn’t that a good thing?
By that logic smoking is not bad for you because many smokers do not get lung cancer. But there is a correlation.
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