"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 _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html