Gum disease linked to breast cancer risk in older women

Middle-aged and older women with gum disease are slightly more likely than those without gum problems to develop breast cancer, suggests a new study.

The risk increase was most pronounced for women with gum disease who smoked cigarettes or had quit within the past 20 years, although the authors caution that the reasons for the links are still not known.

“We don’t know if it’s causal, we need to keep that in mind,” said lead author Jo Freudenheim, distinguished professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health in the University at Buffalo’s School of Public Health and Health Professions in New York State.

It could be that these characteristics are correlated with something else that’s causing both gum disease and breast cancer, she told Reuters Health.

The researchers analyzed data on more than 73,000 postmenopausal women enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study who did not have breast cancer to start with.

About one quarter said they had periodontal disease, a chronic inflammation and infection of the gum tissue around the base of teeth. Gum disease has also been tied to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some other cancers.

After an average of about six and a half years of follow-up, about 2,100 women had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The risk of breast cancer was 14 percent higher for those with gum disease compared to those without it, according to the results in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

When researchers adjusted for a variety of other breast cancer risk factors, including age, weight, exercise, alcohol use and smoking, the extra breast cancer risk associated with gum disease fell to 11 percent.

Researchers then looked at women with breast cancer grouped by smoking status, and found that 23 percent of never smokers had gum disease, 34 percent of former smokers had gum disease and 47 percent of current smokers had gum disease.

In this analysis, never smokers with gum disease had a very small 6 percent increased risk of breast cancer compared to those without gum disease, and for former smokers who had quit more than 20 years earlier there was a similarly small risk increase. For more recent quitters, however, the added risk was 36 percent higher and for current smokers, it was 32 percent higher.

“It could be that periodontal disease means there’s kind of a general inflammation in the body,” Freudenheim said. “Inflammation is related to a number of cancers and stroke and heart disease, so it could be that chronic inflammation is causing both.”

“Another possible mechanism could be that bacteria from the periodontal lesions could enter the blood stream and lead to changes in the tissues which are distant from the mouth,” said Gerard Linden, professor of periodontology at the Center for Public Health at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

“There are changes in sex hormone levels related to the menopause that may affect the response of breast tissues to a stimulus such as exposure to bacteria,” said Linden, who was not part of the new study, by email.

Postmenopausal women should be sure to have regular dental checkups, he said.

“We’re just starting now to understand how important what we call the microbiome is to general health,” and the mouth and gut are full of important microbes, Freudenheim said.

Smoking is strongly tied to gum disease, and less strongly linked to breast cancer, she said.

It’s too early to say that treating or preventing gum disease lowers breast cancer risk, she said.

But, “if what people do in response to this is take care of their teeth that can’t be a bad thing,” she said. — Reuters

Breast cancer in men may be rare, but it happens

Breast cancer usually happens to women. In fact, the American Cancer Society said that one out of eight women suffers from breast cancer worldwide.

But men are not immune to breast cancer. Yes, it may be rare, but it happens. The same organization noted that one out of 1,000 men develops breast cancer.

One of them is Ernesto Petil.

It all started with just a "mere insect bite." Little did he know then that it was the first sign of breast cancer.

"Iyong pagkaalam ko, kinagat lang ng ipis or whatever na insekto. Pinabayaan ko pa rin. Hanggang noong napapansin ko nagkaka-kulani na sa may kili-kili," he said in a report on GMA News TV's "News To Go" on Wednesday. 

However, Petil was not surprised when the doctor confirmed that he had breast cancer. It was in his genes. His sisters also suffered from the disease. In 2013, the mass was removed from his chest.

But it has already spread to his lungs and brain. This means he needs another series of treatments.

"Kung may nagmamagandang loob na nanawagan ako. Kailanga ko kasi ang medication kasi nasabi sa akin na ang chemotherapy, sabi sa akin ng doktor, isang milyon," he added.  




According to the American Cancer Society, since men have breast tissue, they can also develop breast cancer.

Although breast cancer is common among women, men may only learn they have the disease at a later stage. Lack of awareness is one of the reasons why.

Just like Petil, many men may ignore possible warning signs such as lumps and changes in their chest. This could delay diagnosis, the American Cancer Soceity said. Thus, the mass will have a chance to grow.

Here are some signs of breast cancer in men:

    A lump or swelling, usually (but not always) painless
    Skin dimpling or puckering
    Nipple retraction (turning inward)
    Redness or scaling of the nipple or breast skin
    Discharge from the nipple


A breast cancer may also spread to lymph nodes under the arm or around the collar bone and cause a lump or swelling.

"Sa lalaki kasi hindi siya common so parang walang recommended screenings for males. Ang lalaki wala namang breast eh. So kung may tutubo sa chest wall nila, makakapa nila agad-agad," oncologist Dr. Ma. Cecilia Pagdanganan pointed out.

Women should still be alarmed

Although breast cancer do exist in men, women are still the main targets of the disease. In fact, breast cancer is so common in women that most, if not all, studies into the causes, prevention, and treatment of the disease are done with women as case studies.

Hurdling out of breast cancer has never been easy. To help others who are battling this disease, breast cancer survivor Christina Terado has been teaching arts and crafts to those undergoing chemotherapy.

"Nagdasal ako para bibigyan ako ng gabay na mapapagtutuunan ko ng pansin para hindi ko maisip ang sakit ko. Nagtuturo na ako sa cancer patients and iba pang grupo kasi nagiging creative kami at saka positibo kami sa buhay," she said.

Pagdanganan recommended women to undergo a mammogram every other year when they hit 40 years of age until they turn 49 years old—even when they don't see any warning signs.

And when cancer hits, Terado has some words of courage: "Kailangan talagang lumaban ka." — Trisha Macas/BM, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com

Mediterranean diet plus olive oil may reduce breast cancer risk

Over time, eating a Mediterranean-style diet that emphasizes fish, vegetables and particularly olive oil, may lower women’s risk of breast cancer compared to following a low-fat diet, suggests a new study from Spain.

In the five-year trial that randomly assigned women to different kinds of diets, those instructed to eat a Mediterranean-style diet with four tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil per day had about half as many breast cancer diagnoses as those on a low-fat diet.

“With an overall healthy diet plus extra virgin olive oil there is a reduction in the hard endpoint of breast cancer,” said senior author Dr. Miguel A. Martinez-Gonzalez of the University of Navarra in Pamplona and CIBEROBN in Madrid.

“We have now evidence to support that olive oil is causally related to reduction in risk of breast cancer,” he said.

The fact that the findings are based on a randomized trial, the gold-standard of research, “immediately impressed” the journal editors, writes Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, deputy editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, in an editor’s note accompanying the study.

Still, the authors caution in their report, the data come from a larger long-term trial whose primary focus is heart disease. And out of more than 4,000 women included in the breast cancer study, there were only 35 cases of breast cancer, a low number of total cases for statistical analysis. This and a lack of data about cancer-screening mammograms among the women limit the results, they write.

Martinez-Gonzalez and colleagues studied breast cancer outcomes in women participating in PREDIMED, a study of the Mediterranean diet’s protective effects against cardiovascular disease and a variety of other illnesses (see Reuters Health story of May 11, 2015 here: reut.rs/1RyZALT).

Between 2003 and 2009, a total of 4,282 women ages 60 to 80 years old with a high risk of cardiovascular disease were randomly assigned to a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil, the same diet supplemented with nuts or to a comparison group that was told to reduce their overall dietary fat intake.

Those in the two Mediterranean diet groups were given either one liter (34 ounces) of olive oil per week or 30 grams (1 ounce) of nuts per day for free. The olive oil group was instructed to consume about 50 grams (4.2 tablespoons) per day, including in cooked foods and on salads or bread.

The women had quarterly sessions with dieticians, completing questionnaires that gauged how well they were following their assigned diet. There was no specific advice to reduce overall calorie intake or to increase physical activity.

A Mediterranean diet is a plant-based diet that replaces most desserts with fruit, limits beverage intake to mostly water or red wine, reduces dairy intake and keeps red meat consumption to once a week or less, Martinez-Gonzalez said.

Over the course of the study, there were 17 confirmed diagnoses of breast cancer in the low-fat comparison group, 10 in the Mediterranean diet with nuts group and eight in the Mediterranean diet with olive oil group, the researchers found.

There is some evidence with animal studies that extra virgin olive oil, which is rich in polyphenols, may induce programmed cell death or early cancer cells in the breast, Martinez-Gonzalez told Reuters Health.

“It is definitively important to assess with new trials the transferability of a Mediterranean diet to other countries,” he said. “Here our participants were very happy, we provided olive oil for free and gave shopping lists and written materials.”

Done correctly, the Mediterranean diet is delicious and much more enjoyable than a low-fat diet, he said.

There were no apparent negative side effects of the dietary change, he said.

“At the beginning it is tough, but little by little participants change in the right direction and they enjoy the cooking procedure,” he said.

The study had many limitations, but a Mediterranean diet is safe and does reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, Katz writes. “It may also prevent breast cancer. We hope to see more emphasis on Mediterranean diet to reduce cancer and cardiovascular disease and improve health and well-being.” — Reuters

High-fat diets linked to some types of breast cancer

NEW YORK - Women who eat a lot of fat, particularly saturated fat, may be at higher risk of certain types of breast cancer, new research suggests.

Past studies have come to differing conclusions on a possible association between dietary fat and breast cancer. Whether the two are even linked at all remains controversial.

The new report, a second analysis of a large, long-term study, suggests that fat may play a role in the development of certain forms of the disease but not others, the authors said.

Still, it cannot prove that a high-fat diet is the reason any of the women got cancer.

"In our study we confirm that saturated fat intake was positively associated with breast cancer risk," lead author Sabina Sieri, from the Fondazione IRCCS National Cancer Institute in Milan, Italy, told Reuters Health in an email.

"Saturated fatty acids intake should be as low as possible within the context of a nutritionally adequate diet."

Saturated fat in the diet most often comes from meat and other animal products like butter and cheese.

The research team's findings are based on a study of about 337,000 women from 10 European countries. They filled out questionnaires about their diet and lifestyle and were followed for an average of 11 to 12 years.

During that time, about 10,000 of the women were diagnosed with breast cancer.

The original study found that women who ate the most saturated fat were more likely to develop breast cancer than those who ate the least.

For the new analysis, the researchers used patient medical records to classify breast cancers into specific subtypes, for instance based on whether the tumor may respond to the hormones estrogen and progesterone.

They found that women with diets high in saturated fat were 28 percent more likely to develop tumors that had receptors for estrogen and progesterone than women with the lowest saturated fat in their diets. The pattern was similar for total fat intake.

However, the chance of developing breast tumors without receptors for those hormones was not linked to dietary fat, according to the findings published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The researchers said it's possible dietary fat increases the level of sex hormones in the body. That could explain why high-fat diets are tied to a greater risk of tumors whose growth is related to estrogen and progesterone, known as hormone-receptor-positive cancers. Those cancers make up the majority of breast cancer diagnoses.

Sieri and colleagues found that high levels of saturated fat were also linked to a greater risk of HER2 negative breast cancer, but not HER2 positive disease. HER2 stands for human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 and is one factor used to determine how fast a cancer is growing.

Dr. Clifford A. Hudis, chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's Breast Cancer Medicine Service in New York, said the extra risk of hormone-receptor-positive cancer linked to saturated fat was "relatively modest."

What's more, he added, "These patients were not randomly assigned to follow one diet or another."

That means other differences between women who ate high- and low-fat diets may have factored into their cancer risk.

Still, Hudis said, the findings are consistent with recent research looking at specific types of breast cancer and make sense based on what is known about the biological effects of dietary fat.

Dr. Michelle Holmes, who has studied diet and breast cancer at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said that in the grand scheme of things, any possible link between fat and breast cancer still seems to be small.

"In my opinion, the bottom line is that if the association with fat and breast cancer exists, it's fairly small (and) it's probably limited to certain subtypes," Holmes told Reuters Health.

Even though the new study included a "huge" number of women, she said, "the answer doesn't leap out at you."

Hudis and Holmes, who were not involved in the new research, agreed there's no reason women shouldn't still cut back on saturated fat.

"Saturated fat is bad for heart disease anyway," Holmes said.

"The associations with dietary fat are much stronger for heart disease, which still kills more women than breast cancer in the United States." —Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Exercise helps women tolerate breast cancer drugs

SAN ANTONIO — Exercise might help women beat breast cancer. Researchers found it can ease the achy joints and muscle pain that lead many patients to quit taking medicines that treat the disease and lower the risk of a recurrence.

The study is the first major test of an exercise program for women on aromatase inhibitors. These estrogen-blocking pills, sold as Femara, Aromasin and other brands, are recommended for five years after initial breast cancer treatment for hormone-driven tumors, the most common type.

The pills also increasingly are being used to help prevent breast cancer in women at high risk of it because of family history, bad genes or other reasons. A separate study found that one of these medicines — anastrozole, sold as Arimidex and in generic form — cut this risk by 53 percent. It's the second aromatase inhibitor shown to lower risk that much.

Despite how effective the drugs are, many women shun them because they can cause aches and pains, hot flashes and other side effects. About 15 percent of US women have enough risk to merit considering the pills to prevent breast cancer, yet less than 5 percent take them, said Dr. Powel Brown, a prevention expert at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The exercise study involved 121 postmenopausal women taking various aromatase inhibitors to treat breast cancer who complained of achy joints on a pain survey.

About half were assigned to two supervised strength training sessions a week plus at least 150 minutes of aerobic exercise per week. The rest got advice on the benefits of exercise and did their usual activities.

After a year, joint pain scores fell 20 percent among exercisers and 3 percent among the others. The severity of pain and how much it interfered with daily live also declined more in exercisers.

The exercise group improved cardiorespiratory fitness and lost weight — nearly 8 pounds (3.6 kilograms) versus a slight gain in the others. Eighty percent stuck with the program, helped by free access to a gym and a personal trainer.

The National Cancer Institute paid for the study, which was led by Melinda Irwin of the Yale Cancer Center and Dr. Jennifer Ligibel of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Dr. Eric Winer, breast cancer chief at Dana-Farber, said the results may help more women stick with the drugs.

"A lot of people will say, 'if it's going to have a lot of side effects, I'm not going to do it.' The truth is, not everyone gets symptoms. Exercise might be a solution," he said.

The other study was led by Dr. Jack Cuzick of Queen Mary University of London and tested anastrozole for preventing first breast cancers. Nearly 4,000 women were given the drug or daily dummy pills, and 70 percent stuck with them for five years, just a little less than the placebo group.

After that time, 40 women on anastrozole had developed breast cancer versus 85 of the others, a 53 percent reduction in risk. That's comparable to how another aromatase inhibitor — exemestane, or Aromasin — did in an earlier study and better than tamoxifen, the longest-used breast cancer prevention medicine.

Women on anastrozole had more joint pain and hot flashes, but these also were very common in the placebo group — more than half of both groups reported these problems, which often are due to menopause and aging, Cuzick said.

Anastrozole users had more cases of a painful wrist condition called carpal tunnel syndrome, and dry eye, but these were relatively rare. Aromatase inhibitors are known to raise the risk of fractures, so many women take bone-strengthening drugs to help prevent that problem.

Besides the British cancer research agency, London-based AstraZeneca PLC, which makes the anastrozole used in the study, Arimidex, helped pay for the work, and some researchers are paid speakers for the company.

Results were discussed Thursday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium and published by the British journal Lancet. In a commentary in the journal, Dr. David A. Cameron of Edinburgh Cancer Center in Scotland wrote that healthy women still may resist prevention drugs unless taking them turns out to save lives, not just avoid disease.

The cancer conference is sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research, Baylor College of Medicine and the UT Health Science Center. —Associated Press

source: gmanetwork.com

Angelina Jolie has double mastectomy to elude breast cancer

LONDON -- Hollywood star Angelina Jolie has had a double mastectomy to reduce her chances of getting breast cancer and says she hopes her story will inspire other women fighting the life-threatening disease.

Jolie wrote in the New York Times on Tuesday the operation has made it easier for her to reassure her six children that she would not die young from cancer, like her own mother did at 56.

"We often speak of 'Mommy's mommy', and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me," wrote Jolie, 37.

"I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a 'faulty' gene."

The Oscar-winning actress said her doctors had estimated she had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer.

"Once I knew this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much as I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy," she said.




Partner and fellow Hollywood star Brad Pitt was by Jolie's side through three months of treatment that ended late in April, she said. The two got engaged last year.

Jolie said that even though she had kept silent about her treatment while it was going on, she hoped her story would now help other women.

"I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested."

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization. It is estimated that one in 300 to one in 500 women carry a BRCA 1 or BRCA 2 gene mutation, as Jolie does.

Her decision was hailed by breast cancer patients and charities.

Richard Francis, Head of Research at the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity in Britain, said it demonstrated the importance of educating women with the gene fault.

"For women like Angelina it's important that they are made fully aware of all the options that are available, including risk-reducing surgery and extra breast screening," Francis told Reuters.

Breast Cancer Campaign Chief Executive Baroness Delyth Morgan said Jolie's openness in talking about her experience and her decision to have surgery would raise awareness of the disease and its risk.

Jolie won a 1999 best supporting actress Oscar for "Girl, Interrupted".

She lends her star power to a range of humanitarian campaigns, including serving more than 10 years as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

In April, she urged governments to step up efforts to bring wartime sex offenders to justice. - Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com