Early Drinking could Boost Risk of Breast Disease and Breast Cancer

Females who drink at an early age are at increased risk for developing benign breast disease, based on a new study reported on-line April 12 in Pediatrics. Benign breast lumps, or noncancerous bumps, cysts or lumps inside the breast are known risk factors for breast cancer.

Following some 7,000 girls aged 9 to 15 from 1996 to 2007, researchers discovered that the risk of benign breast disease increased with the quantity and frequency of alcohol consumed in young women. Particularly, respondents who reported drinking six or seven days per week had been five.5 times more likely to have benign breast illness than those that never drank or who drank much less than when a week, reported the study authors, led by Catherine S. Berkey, ScD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston. Teen girls who drank 3 to 5 days a week were at 3-fold risk.

All of the respondents had been portion of the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS), a large-scale study of American adolescent girls whose mothers participated in the Nurses' Wellness Study II.

Started in 1996, GUTS involved far more than 9,000 adolescent girls who answered questionnaires annually from 1996 through 2001, followed by surveys in 2003, 2005 and 2007. The 2003 survey, carried out when the respondents had been 16 to 23 years old, contained questions about their alcohol consumption in the prior year. The 2005 and 2007 surveys asked no matter whether they had ever been diagnosed with benign breast illness by a health care provider. A total of 6,899 ladies aged 18 to 27 years responded towards the 2005 and 2007 surveys.

"We know from a lot of other studies of adult females that alcohol intake later in life increases breast cancer risk," says Graham Colditz, MD, DrPH, associate director of prevention and control at the Siteman Cancer Center at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

"But a lot of ladies begin drinking alcohol as adolescents appropriate in the time in which breast tissue is going by way of stages of rapid proliferation. So we wanted to see if the effect of alcohol on breast cancer risk was operative in this younger group."

The impact seems apparent. On average, participants who were diagnosed with benign breast illness drank more regularly, had more per occasion, and reported more cases of binge drinking. They also consumed two times a lot more alcohol per day compared to those without benign breast illness.

"The study is an indication that alcohol should be restricted in adolescence and early adult years and further focuses our attention on these years as important to stopping breast cancer later in life," says Colditz.

The outcomes with the study add towards the growing list of issues related to early drinking. Prior analysis has linked early alcohol use with alcoholism, employment difficulties, drug abuse and criminal and violent acts.

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