October 13, 2011 Blog

THE ALCOHOL-BREAST CANCER CONNECTION

Sarah is dying of breast cancer after 21 years. She had surgery in 1990 on her right breast and had two positive nodes in her axilla. She had post-operative radiation and was disease free for five years. Then it came back in one of her ribs and a vertebra.

She has been on chemotherapy intermittently for fifteen years. One by one the chemo drugs were used, initially with success. Eventually, the tumor would become resistant to the drug and they would switch to another.

The latest drugs are novel drugs that prevent blood vessels from growing, thus starving the tumors. Sometimes they are remarkably effective. They were in Sarah’s case. They have been working for over five years.

Until now.

Slowly, she is losing the battle. There are tumors in her liver and the scans show they are growing.

Sarah had none of the traditional risk factors for breast cancer. She had three children and breastfed them all. She had no family history of breast cancer. She never took hormone replacement because of a possible link to breast cancer.

But she did drink a moderate amount of alcohol, and continues to.

Back then we didn’t know that alcohol could cause breast cancer. Now we do. The awakening was finding a group of women in Marin County with a 65 % increase in breast cancer over control populations. Epidemiologists swarmed into the area to determine what these women did that was different than the control population.

They drank wine.

Since then, more evidence has accumulated that breast cancer is caused by alcohol. They have even been able to construct a mathematical formula. For every ounce of alcohol a woman drinks per day, her risk of breast cancer increases by 5%.

Sarah still drinks moderately when she is not on chemo.

The same women that eschew hormone replacement because of its slight and controversial role in causing breast cancer will drink one or two glasses of wine daily.

Less well known but every bit as important is the knowledge that drinking alcohol can facilitate the spread (metastasis) of cancer. It does so by suppressing the immune system, specifically the natural killer T-cells that are critical in the body’s defense against the formation and the spread of cancer.

People refuse to listen to what they do not want to hear.

Ironically, in a move that demonstrates incredible ignorance or ironclad denial, our local cancer society’s fundraiser was…you guessed it…a wine tasting.

October is breast cancer awareness month.

Every month is “alcohol causes nine different kinds of cancer month”.

Spread the word.

jh