Inside Prevention

Breast cancer ties to environment probed (San Francisco Chronicle, 2/27/2013)

News stories exploring the links between breast cancer and the environment are popping up all over the place. A great trend piece in the San Francisco Chronicle highlights some of the recent research and reports, and tells the story of Breast Cancer Fund Strong Voice Marika Holmgren who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37 and started to ask questions that spurred her into activism: 

Could it have been the chemicals in the blush and lipstick she once wore daily? Did it matter that she lives in Half Moon Bay, where breast cancer rates exceed the state average?

"When I got diagnosed, I really started to understand how many women were out there with very few risk factors, including myself," she said. "It makes us start to wonder, what can we be doing to lower those numbers and increase prevention and eradicate environmental risk factors?"

The San Francisco Chronicle also re-printed an Environmental Health News series that poses the question: 

"How can we begin to find a cure if we don’t first know the cause?"

The series features a longitudinal study of the environmental causes of breast cancer, which uses data from 15,000 Bay Area women.

Phthalates and BPA make an unexpected appearance

A new dietary intervention study suggests that an individual may not be able to avoid food packaging chemicals like phthalates (plastic softeners) and BPA (found in canned foods and older hard plastic containers) by cutting out canned and plastic-wrapped foods because these chemicals can—and do—enter the food during processing.

Researchers from the University of Washington replicated the 2011 Breast Cancer Fund and Silent Spring Institute dietary intervention study and found DEHP (a phthalate used in food packaging) levels increased 24-fold during the intervention.

The researchers were puzzled by this finding—our study found phthalate and BPA levels declined during the intervention diet—so they followed up by testing spices and dairy used in the intervention diet. They found high levels of DEHP in spices like coriander, cinnamon and cayenne pepper, as well as in dairy products.

The researchers also found modest increases in BPA during the intervention. This finding may be due to a study population who already ate mostly fresh foods—in fact, only three of the 10 families who participated indicated eating canned foods.

These findings underscore the need for federal reform of food contact laws that can ensure chemicals linked to hormone disruption don't end up in our food supply. The FDA has the authority to regulate chemicals our food touches at all points in the process from field to table: from the type of plastic tubing used in milking equipment, to the containers spices are held in before being divvied up in store-shelf sizes, to the plastic wrap on supermarket cheese.

Our role is to see that the FDA actually uses this power to protect our health.

For more on this study, check out Fast Company (You’re Eating Toxic Chemicals, Even If You Eat Organic And Avoid Plastic) and the NRDC blog (What's for lunch? Likely a few hormone-disrupting chemicals - phthalates and BPA).

Study shows increase in metastatic breast cancer at first diagnosis for young women

A paper published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association describes a small but statistically significant increase in the incidence of breast cancer with remote metastases (breast cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, including the bones, brain and lungs) at first diagnosis for women aged 25 to 39 years.

This statistical study examined the incidence of breast cancer in women in the U.S. from 1976 to 2009. The increase in remote metastases at first diagnosis was not seen in older women. There was also no increase in the incidence of local breast cancer (confined to the breast only) or regional breast cancer (cancer that has spread to adjacent organs like lymph nodes or the chest wall) diagnoses in younger women.

There's been a lot of commentary on this paper already, some of which has been potentially misleading. Our friends at the Young Survival Coalition have published an in-depth and thoughtful blog post on this paper that puts this new data into context.

There is a need for more research to confirm this finding—something the paper's authors agree needs to be done.

If this increase is confirmed, we need to find out how such an increase could occur within a single generation of women. In particular, we want to know what's causing metastatic breast cancer—including potential environmental exposures—among women of all ages.

U.S. report urges deeper look into breast cancer's environmental links (Center for Public Integrity, 2/12/2013)

More coverage of this week's major report release, this from the Center for Public Integrity:

Compiled by the congressionally mandated Interagency Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Coordinating Committee, the report notes that most cases of breast cancer “occur in people with no family history,” suggesting that “environmental factors — broadly defined — must play a major role in the etiology of the disease.”

Yet only a fraction of federal research funding has gone toward examining links between breast cancer and ubiquitous chemicals such as the plastic hardening agent bisphenol A; the herbicide atrazine; and dioxin, a byproduct of plastics manufacturing and burning, says the report, prepared for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and released today.

“Prevention needs to be as important as other investments that are made in screening, treatment and access to care,” Jeanne Rizzo, co-chair of the committee and president of the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund, said in an interview. (Read complete article.)

Emphasizing breast cancer prevention (San Francisco Chronicle, 2/11/2013)

The San Francisco Chronicle weighed in on yesterday's game-changing report in an editorial that urges lawmakers to take action:

"So now it will be up to the Obama administration and Congress to act on this compelling case to prioritize prevention on a disease that is costing 40,000 lives and more than $17 billion a year...This report should give Washington the political will it needs to put the nation's health interest first."

The editorial echoes (and quotes) the voice of Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo:

"We are all exposed to a cocktail of carcinogens and endocrine disrupters every day that puts us at greater risk for breast cancer, and we need to prioritize and invest in identifying and preventing exposures to these chemicals."(Read complete article.)

Welcome to the breast cancer prevention era? (Huffington Post, 2/13/2013)

Read and share this new Huffington Post blog by Jeanne Rizzo, President and CEO of the Breast Cancer Fund, as well as co-chair of the federal advisory committee that yesterday released a report concluding that preventing environmental exposures is the most promising path to decrease incidence of the disease.

Is this indeed the start of a new era in breast cancer awareness, research and -- yes -- prevention? We hope so.

If you're under 50, you can't remember the dark days when the tobacco industry was winning the PR war, insisting that smoking wasn't linked to cancer. That all changed in 1964 when the Surgeon General's report on smoking and health created a seismic shift, alerting the nation to the health risks of tobacco and, notably, moving the focus from individual behavior to the public-health impacts of smoking. The report ushered in an anti-smoking era, complete with a national strategy that reshaped the research agenda and inspired policies and public education initiatives that greatly reduced smoking across the nation.

With the release of a groundbreaking federal report today, there's hope that we're entering a breast cancer prevention era -- one in which my young granddaughters won't remember a time when the chemical industry got away with its story that breast cancer isn't linked to chemical exposures, and when the only focus on prevention was on personal behavior. (Read complete article.)

Report faults priorities in studying breast cancer (New York Times, 2/12/2013)

The New York Times spoke with Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo about yesterday's groundbreaking report, "Breast Cancer and the Environment: Prioritizing Prevention." Jeanne served as co-chair of the federal advisory committee that produced the report.

Jeanne Rizzo, another member of the committee and a member of the Breast Cancer Fund, an advocacy group, said there was an urgent need to study and regulate chemical exposures and inform the public about potential risks. "We’re extending life with breast cancer, making it a chronic disease, but we’re not preventing it," she said.

"We have to look at early life exposures, in utero, childhood, puberty, pregnancy and lactation," Ms. Rizzo said. "Those are the periods when you get set up for breast cancer. How does a pregnant woman protect her child? How do we create policy so that she doesn't have to be a toxicologist when she goes shopping?" (Read complete article.)

We're making history today

"Evidence suggests that breast cancer can be prevented."

While these words might not seem revolutionary to those of us who have been working to prevent the disease for years, they will make big news today because of who is saying them: a federal committee of leading breast cancer experts, co-chaired by Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo. The committee’s report calls for a shift in the multi-billion dollar breast cancer research agenda toward prevention. That’s groundbreaking! 

This congressionally mandated Interagency Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Coordinating Committee concludes that preventing exposure to environmental risk factors is the most promising path to decrease incidence of the disease, and is the "key to reducing the burden" on individuals, families and society. 

Sound familiar? That’s because this report builds on work the Breast Cancer Fund has been doing for more than a decade. We were honored to be part of developing this important report, and will continue to work to bring about its vision of a sea change in the way our society views and understands breast cancer.

Read our press release, take action and stay tuned for more information about this paradigm-shifting report.