Can Breast Milk Predict Cancer?

TIME :

Breast milk, she reasoned, contains millions of cells shed by various parts of the breast and therefore would serve as a better representative of any cancer activity occurring in the tissue.

Read the whole story: TIME

Comments

[onionboy]

12:39 PM on 04/05/2011

Isn't this basically non-invasive ductal lavage?

[techjockey]

02:10 AM on 04/05/2011

The long & the short of it is that without a positive diagnosis, how is this really going to help?
Are women that have just given birth going to add the stress of a double mastecomy or go on a drug that causes horrible side effects & significantly increases the risk of other equally deadly cancers?
Don't think this is going to happen.
When there is a viable "prevention" for women to utilize, that is when this study will become helpful.

[nancynancy]

07:03 PM on 04/04/2011

"I'm attending the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Orlando, Fla., where an interesting study was presented Monday about the potential of breast milk to help, of all things, prevent cancer."

What sloppy science writing from Time.com. There is absolutely nothing about this study that in any way shape or form "prevents" cancer. The study was trying to "predict" who might go on to develop cancer, but predicting cancer is not, I repeat, not the same thing as preventing cancer.

Should this screening program ever become widespread, it would be one more fishing expedition in the pink ribboned, breast cancer industry's quest to overdiagnose and overtreat this disease -- a strategy that ultimately fails to benefit the women it is supposed to help.

[No death panels]

08:19 PM on 04/04/2011

It's not for screening, it is risk assessment. If the method pans out high risk women might opt for prophylactic Tamoxifen or surgery. Tamoxifen reduces breast cancer risk by 50%, surgery by about 98%. There's prevention for you.

[nancynancy]

08:48 PM on 04/04/2011

You might want to read the article one more time, because the author clearly states the researcher's ultimate goal is to "screen" all women (not just the "high risk" women selected for this study) immediately after they have given birth.

"If the results hold with repeated studies, she anticipates that breast milk screening might become a noninvasive way that all mothers giving birth could be screened for breast cancer before they leave the hospital."

Incidentally, I have had prophylactic surgery and it reduces risk by approximately 90%, not 98%. Tamoxifen somewhat reduces the risk of breast cancer but raises the risk of uterine cancer and can cause potentially fatal blood clots and strokes.

[muhair]

10:00 PM on 04/04/2011

I thought it was going to be about correlating the toxic chemicals they're finding in breast milk these days with cancer rates. It would need to be longitudinal, however, and assorted variables would come into play. But certainly worth doing. There's a curious tendency in biomonitoring studies to ignore outcomes.