Breast Cancer Link To Cleaning Products

US researchers found that women who reported high use of cleaning products, air fresheners and insect repellents had a higher risk of breast cancer compared with women who reported using them sparingly: however they cautioned that because the study relied on women's recall of product use, and their beliefs about how such products might contribute to cancer development could have influenced their recall, it should not be taken as proof of a link, but sufficient reason to research it more thoroughly.

You can read about how Dr Julia Brody, from the Silent Spring Institute, whose headquarters are in Newton, Massachusetts, and colleagues arrived at these findings in a report that was published online in the journal Environmental Health on 20 July. 

For the study, which Brody and colleagues believe to be the first to investigate cleaning products and breast cancer, they conducted telephone interviews with 787 women in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, who were diagnosed with breast cancer between 1988 and 1995 and 721 women picked at random for comparison. 

Brody told the press they found that:

"Women who reported the highest combined cleaning product use had a doubled risk of breast cancer compared to those with the lowest reported use."

She said use of air fresheners and products to control mold and mildew were linked to increased risk.

In the telephone interviews the researchers asked the women about product use, their beliefs about the causes of breast cancer, and their established and suspected breast cancer risk factors.

As well as looking for any links between product use and breast cancer risk, the researchers evaluated potential recall bias by doing what they called a "stratified analysis". They did this in two ways:

1. In the first stratified analysis they looked at links between product use and breast cancer incidence arranged according to beliefs about whether chemicals and pollutants contribute to breast cancer.
2. In the second they looked at links between family history and breast cancer incidence and also arranged them according to beliefs about how much family history contributes to breast cancer.

The logic behind this was they thought since family history was less likely to be influenced by recall bias, any recall bias due to beliefs would stand out in comparison.

The results showed that:

• Risk of developing breast cancer was twice as high in the 25 per cent of women who reported the most combined cleaning product use compared to the 25 per cent who reported the least (they compared the uppermost "quartile" with the lowest: adjusted odds ratio OR was 2.1, with 95 per cent confidence interval CI ranging from 1.4 to 3.3).
• The result was similar for combined air freshener use (uppermost to lowest quartile comparison showed an adjusted OR = 1.9, with 95% CI ranging from 1.2 to 3.0).
• There was no such link with pesticide use.
• In the stratified analyses, the odds ratios for cleaning products linked to breast cancer risk were higher among participants who said they believed that pollutants contributed "a lot" to breast cancer, and tended towards null among participants who did not report such a belief.
• In comparison, the odds ratio for breast cancer and family history was also higher among women who believed that heredity contributed "a lot", and it was not so high among the rest (OR 2.6 versus 0.7 respectively: no overlap in the CIs).

The researchers concluded that these results suggest that cleaning product use contributes to increased breast cancer risk.
 But, they pointed out, the results also highlight the difficulties of trying to tease apart valid links from those tainted by recall bias, a common problem in studies that rely on self-reports. 

"Recall bias may influence higher odds ratios for product use among participants who believed that chemicals and pollutants contribute to breast cancer," wrote the researchers. 

However, they did not stop there, and raised an interesting counterpoint, arising from the results from the stratification analyses:

"Alternatively, the influence of experience on beliefs is another explanation, illustrated by the protective odds ratio for family history among women who do not believe heredity contributes 'a lot' " 

Speculating on the potential influence of bias recall, Brody said that when people are diagnosed with cancer, they often think about what might have caused it: what happened in the past that may contributed to the disease?

"As a result, it may be that women with breast cancer more accurately recall their past product use or even over-estimate it," she said.

On the other hand, it could be that experience of a disease also affects our beliefs about what causes it.

"For example, women diagnosed with breast cancer are less likely to believe heredity contributes 'a lot', because most are the first in their family to get the disease," she added.

In other words, it is difficult to say which way recall bias might have influenced the results and whether such effects cancel each other out or reinforce each other. 

Nonetheless, argued the researchers, given that it is biologically plausible that exposure to the sorts of chemicals contained in household cleaning products contribute to the development of breast cancer because many of them contain mammary gland carcinogens or chemicals that disrupt hormones.


In the light of the overall results, they recommended it would be worth doing a prospective study on the potential links between cleaning products and breast cancer that also brings in measurements from environmental and biological media. (Prospective studies avoid recall bias because they follow groups of people over time rather than ask them to recall the past).




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"Self-reported chemicals exposure, beliefs about disease causation, and risk of breast cancer in the Cape Cod Breast Cancer and Environment Study: a case-control study."
Ami R. Zota, Ann Aschengrau, Ruthann A. Rudel and Julia Green Brody.
Environmental Health Published online 20 July 2010.
DOI:10.1186/1476-069X-9-40

Additional source: BioMed Central (via ScienceDaily).

Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD 

Breast Cancer No Match For Peach & Plum Phenols Research Shows Alternatives to Chemotherapy

"Rich Lady" Beats Breast Cancer

Breast cancer cells - even the most aggressive type - died after treatments with peach and plum extracts in lab tests at Texas AgriLife Research recently, and scientists say the results are deliciously promising. Not only did the cancerous cells keel over, but the normal cells were not harmed in the process.

AgriLife Research scientists say two phenolic compounds are responsible for the cancer cell deaths in the study, which was published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry. The phenols are organic compounds that occur in fruits. They are slightly acidic and may be associated with traits such as aroma, taste or color.

"It was a differential effect which is what you're looking for because in current cancer treatment with chemotherapy, the substance kills all cells, so it is really tough on the body," said Dr. David Byrne, AgriLife Research plant breeder who studies stone fruit. "Here, there is a five-fold difference in the toxic intensity. You can put it at a level where it will kill the cancer cells - the very aggressive ones - and not the normal ones."

Byrne and Dr. Luis Cisneros-Zevallos originally studied the antioxidants and phytonutrients in plums and found them to match or exceed the blueberry which had been considered superior to other fruits in those categories.

"The following step was to choose some of these high antioxidant commercial varieties and study their anticancer properties," Cisneros-Zevallos said. "And we chose breast cancer as the target because it's one of the cancers with highest incidence among women. So it is of big concern."

According to the National Cancer Institute, there were 192,370 new cases of breast cancer in females and 1,910 cases in males in 2009. That year, 40,170 women and 440 men died from breast cancer. The World Health Organization reports that breast cancer accounts for 16 percent of the cancer deaths of women globally. Cisneros-Zevallos, an AgriLife Research food scientist, said the team compared normal cells to two types of breast cancer, including the most aggressive type. The cells were treated with an extract from two commercial varieties, the "Rich Lady" peach and the "Black Splendor" plum.

"These extracts killed the cancer cells but not the normal cells," Cisneros-Zevallos said.

A closer look at the extracts determined that two specific phenolic acid components - chlorogenic and neochlorogenic - were responsible for killing the cancer cells while not affecting the normal cells, Cisneros-Zevallos said.

The two compounds are very common in fruits, the researchers said, but the stone fruits such as plums and peaches have especially high levels.

"So this is very, very attractive from the point of view of being an alternative to typical chemotherapy which kills normal cells along with cancerous ones," Byrne added.

The team said laboratory tests also confirmed that the compounds prevented cancer from growing in animals given the compounds.

Byrne plans to examine more fully the lines of the varieties that were tested to see how these compounds might be incorporated into his research of breeding plums and peaches. Cisneros-Zevallos will continue testing these extracts and compounds in different types of cancer and conduct further studies of the molecular mechanisms involved.

The work documenting the health benefits of stone fruit has been supported by the Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center at Texas A&M University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Tree Fruit Agreement.

Source:
Kathleen Phillips
Texas A&M AgriLife Communications