Women need place in the sun in the battle of breast cancer risk

[Ezliving_Jim]

Women need place in the sun in the battle of breast cancer risk

By Nigel Hawkes
Saturday August 04 2007


WOMEN who stay out of the sun are increasing their risk of developing breast cancer, a new study suggests.


The safe tanning messages that are drummed into women every year may help to reduce their risk of skin cancer - but at the cost of increasing their risk of breast cancer.

The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, shows that the lower the levels of Vitamin D in a woman's bloodstream, the greater the risk of her developing breast cancer if she has passed the menopause.

Most Vitamin D comes from the exposure of the skin to sunlight but, in this trial, it was provided in the form of vitamin supplements.

A team from Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, enrolled 1,179 women all 55 or older, who had no history of cancer. The women were randomly divided into groups and given either supplements of calcium alone, calcium plus Vitamin D, or a placebo for four years.

Osteoporosis

The researchers were principally interested in the risk of the women suffering from osteoporosis, but they also looked at cancer risks since observational studies have strongly suggested that breast cancer is less common among women who live closer to the Equator, where the sunshine is stronger.

The team found that women who received both calcium and Vitamin D supplements had less than half the chance of developing breast cancer than those given a placebo (13 cases among 446 women compared with 20 cases among 288 women).

Calcium alone also had a protective effect against cancer, but it was not so strong.

When the researchers repeated the analysis for those women who were free of cancer after the first year of the study, the results were even more striking. In this second analysis, the risks were reduced by more than three quarters.

"These findings highlight the importance of promoting optimum Vitamin D status and underscore the value of achieving and maintaining a high serum 25(OH)D concentration," the researchers said.

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