"Breast-feeding a child for a year can reduce the mother's risk of
developing breast cancer by about 50% compared with women who have never
breast-fed, Yale University researchers report.

``I strongly advise mothers to breast-feed their babies,'' Dr. Tongzhang
Zheng, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale University School of
Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, told Reuters Health. ``It's for their
own benefit.''

Zheng and colleagues compared about 500 Connecticut women who had recently
been diagnosed with breast cancer with a group of 500 women the same age who
did not have breast cancer.

The investigators found that women who had breast-fed more than three
children or had breast-fed a first child for more than 13 months had about
half the risk of developing breast cancer compared with women who had never
breast-fed their children.

Breast-feeding is one of the few factors in the development of breast cancer
that a woman can control, the researchers note in the June issue of the
British Journal of Cancer. However, Zheng conceded that cultural differences
may make it more difficult for American women to breast-feed than Asian
women, even if they so desire.

Zheng recently published another study that found that Chinese women who
breast-fed for 2 or more years had about half the breast cancer risk as
women who breast-fed for less than 6 months.

``In Asian cultures, breast-feeding is a mother's duty, and you can stay at
home a year with full pay (after giving birth),'' he said. ``In this
country, with the pressure for returning to work, this society has much
shorter duration of breast-feeding.''

However, Zheng added, some researchers believe the preventive benefit of
breast-feeding may be due to either the suppression of the menstrual cycle's
hormonal fluctuations or the elimination of toxins from the breast. If so,
then women who pump their breast milk would probably receive the same level
of protection from breast cancer as women who breast-feed naturally, he
said.

The current study was funded by the National Cancer Institute and the
National Institute of Environmental Health Science.

SOURCE: British Journal of Cancer 2001;84:1472-1476.


Me speaking now:  So, for every 100 women who didn't breastfeed and got
breast cancer, 50 women who did breastfeed got breast cancer.  That's a 50%
decrease in risk, if we take the bottle-feeding mothers as the standard.
That means 50 women (in the breastfeeding group) who didn't have to go
through the trauma of getting the diagnosis, telling their family and
friends, having surgery, having chemo, having radiation, and then spending
the rest of their life worried that it will come back, or dealing with it
when it did come back and possibly kill them.  That's a lot of suffering
bypassed.

If we look at it the 'other way' -- if we 'Wiessingerize' it -- then we can
say for every 100 women who breastfeed who got breast cancer, there would be
200 women who bottlefed who got breast cancer.  That's a 100% increase in
the rate of breast cancer, directly due to formula-feeding.

It's the same information -- the exact same information -- but the impact is
so much greater when you use breastfeeding as the standard.

Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nutrition
Texas A&M University


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