Muffin Tops Affect Breast Cancer Risk

In an interesting finding in regards to breast cancer and body fat distribution, new research shows that there is an element that might not be sex hormone related.
Much of the information that you hear in regards to hormone mediated cancers points to estrogen as being a major culprit. To give you a simple example, estrogen makes tissue (and tumors) grow, progesterone directs the tissues to grow healthy and die healthy.

That is why we recommend to look at hormones with balance, assess properly and make the proper adjustments whether nutritionally and/or hormonally.

It turns out that researchers have just discovered that premenopausal women who carry excess fat around their abdomen or have a large waist relative to their hip size may face a higher risk for breast cancer that is estrogen receptor (ER)-negative. This excess fat distribution is usually a result of a condition called insulin resistance, basically the bodies’ inefficiency to balance insulin release and blood sugar management, often as a result of diet.

The research team noted that such body fat distribution was linked more strongly to the risk for developing this particular type of cancer than it was to a risk for ER-positive breast cancer.

Estrogen receptor (ER)-negative breast cancer means that the cancer lacks receptors for the female hormone estrogen, so the hormone does not stimulate the cancer to grow.

The research team led by Holly R. Harris of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and her colleagues focused on data from more than 116,000 women who had been enrolled in the Nurses Health Study II since 1989, including waist and hip circumference, recorded in 1993.

The fact that ER-negative breast cancer was more strongly linked to abdominal fat and the waist-hip ratio than ER-positive breast cancer suggests, according to the researchers, that the means by which body fat distribution influences cancer risk sidesteps sex-hormone pathways.

The findings "may suggest that an insulin-related pathway" related to abdominal fat is involved in the development of premenopausal breast cancer, the researchers concluded.

For more information on how diet and excess fat and weight gain can affect your health, contact us here at Longevity league.com