Research rejects green tea for breast cancer prevention
2010-10-28
(Press-News.org) Green tea does not protect against breast cancer. A study of data from approximately 54,000 women, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Breast Cancer Research, found no association between drinking green tea and breast cancer risk.
Motoki Iwasaki, from the National Cancer Center, Tokyo, worked with a team of researchers to carry out the study. He said, "Although in vitro and animal-based studies have suggested that green tea may have beneficial protective effects against breast cancer, results from human studies have been inconclusive. Our large-scale, population-based prospective cohort study is one of the first to include a wide range of tea intakes; women who drank green tea less than 1 cup per week to those who drank 10 or more cups per day. It found no overall association between green tea intake and the risk of breast cancer".
Tea intake was assessed by questionnaire, once at the beginning of the study and then again five years later. Cancer incidence was assessed by notification from major local hospitals in the study area and data linkage with population-based cancer registries. Approximately 12% of women drank green tea less than 1 cup per week while 27% drank 5 or more cups per day. Speaking about the survey, Iwasaki said, "The other major strength of the present study was its prospective design, in which information was collected before the subsequent diagnosis of breast cancer, thereby avoiding the exposure recall bias inherent to case-control studies. Drinking green tea as a beverage is unlikely to reduce the risk of breast cancer regardless of green tea type and number of cups".
###
Notes to Editors
1. Green tea drinking and subsequent risk of breast cancer in a population-based cohort of Japanese women
Motoki Iwasaki, Manami Inoue, Shizuka Sasazuki, Norie Sawada, Taiki Yamaji, Taichi Shimazu, Walter C Willett, Shoichiro Tsugane and for the Japan Public Health Center-based Prospective Study Group (JPHC)
Breast Cancer Research (in press)
During embargo, article available here: http://breast-cancer-research.com/
After the embargo, article available at the journal website: http://breast-cancer-research.com/imedia/2113150999395802_article.pdf?random=472472
Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the article. All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central's open access policy.
Article citation and URL available on request at press@biomedcentral.com on the day of publication.
2. Breast Cancer Research is an international, peer-reviewed online journal, publishing original research, reviews, commentaries and reports. Research articles of exceptional interest are published in all areas of biology and medicine relevant to breast cancer, including normal mammary gland biology, with special emphasis on the genetic, biochemical, and cellular basis of breast cancer.
3. BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/) is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector.
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2010-10-28
In new research published today, researchers uncover evolution in action in cancer cells. They show the forces of evolution in pancreatic tumours mean that not only is cancer genetically different between different patients, but each new focus of cancer spread within a patient has acquired distinct mutations.
Effectively, ten different foci of cancer spread are ten different, but related, tumours. The complexity of pancreatic cancer genetics uncovered in this work helps to explain the difficulty of treating the disease but also strengthens the need for improved methods ...
2010-10-28
(SALT LAKE CITY)—Just seven months after University of Utah geneticists took part in a landmark study that sequenced for the first time the genome of an entire Utah family, U of U researchers have taken part in another historic study that is the first large-scale genome sequencing project – 179 people representing three continents – and 60 Utahns played a major role in this study, too.
Published Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010, in Nature, the study demonstrates how quickly the science of genome sequencing is expanding – first from individuals, then to families, and now to large ...
2010-10-28
BOSTON--A new oral drug caused dramatic shrinkage of a patient's rare, aggressive form of soft-tissue cancer that was driven by an abnormally activated protein, physician-scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in the Oct. 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
A second patient who had a similar tumor that was not fueled by the mutant protein, called ALK (named for the first disease in which it was found, anaplastic lymphoma kinase), failed to respond to the drug, said the researchers, confirming the inhibitor's specificity for the abnormal protein. ...
2010-10-28
Scientists have invented methods to scout the human genome's repetitive landscapes, where DNA sequences are highly identical and heavily duplicated. These advances, as reported today in Science, can identify subtle but important differences among people in the number and content of repeated DNA segments.
These copy number variations partly account for the normal diversity among people. Copy number variations might also be why some people, and not others, have certain disorders or disease susceptibilities, and might also determine how severely they are affected.
Until ...
2010-10-28
STANFORD, Calif. — The immune system may play a critical role in ensuring the success of certain types of cancer therapies, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The research showed treatments that disable cancer-promoting genes called oncogenes are much more successful in eradicating tumors in the presence of a signaling molecule secreted by kind of immune cell called a T helper cell.
The finding is important because many drugs now in use in humans are often tested in lab animals with weakened immune systems and many human ...
2010-10-28
PASADENA, Calif.—Five years ago, neuroscientist Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried of UCLA, and their colleagues discovered that a single neuron in the human brain can function much like a sophisticated computer and recognize people, landmarks, and objects, suggesting that a consistent and explicit code may help transform complex visual representations into long-term and more abstract memories.
Now Koch and Fried, along with former Caltech graduate student and current postdoctoral fellow Moran Cerf, have found ...
2010-10-28
Pancreatic tumors are one of the most lethal cancers, with fewer than five percent of patients surviving five years after diagnosis. But a new study that peers deeply into the genetics of pancreatic cancer presents a bit of good news: an opportunity for early diagnosis. In contrast to earlier predictions, many pancreatic tumors are, in fact, slow growing, taking nearly 20 years to become lethal after the first genetic perturbations appear.
"There have been two competing theories explaining why pancreatic cancers are so lethal," says Bert Vogelstein, the Howard Hughes ...
2010-10-28
Small genetic differences between individuals help explain why some people have a higher risk than others for developing illnesses such as diabetes or cancer. Today in the journal Nature, the 1000 Genomes Project, an international public-private consortium, published the most comprehensive map of these genetic differences, called variations, estimated to contain approximately 95 percent of the genetic variation of any person on Earth.
Researchers produced the map using next-generation DNA sequencing technologies to systematically characterize human genetic variation ...
2010-10-28
VICTORIA – Industrial-scale aquaculture production magnifies environmental degradation, according to the first global assessment of the effects of marine finfish aquaculture (e.g. salmon, cod, turbot and grouper) released today. This is true even when farming operations implement the best current marine fish farming practices.
Dr. John Volpe and his team at the University of Victoria developed the Global Aquaculture Performance Index (GAPI), an unprecedented system for objectively measuring the environmental performance of fish farming.
"Scale is critical," said Dr. ...
2010-10-28
HAWK-I [1] is one of the newest and most powerful cameras on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). It is sensitive to infrared light, which means that much of the obscuring dust in the galaxies' spiral arms becomes transparent to its detectors. Compared to the earlier, and still much-used, VLT infrared camera ISAAC, HAWK-I has sixteen times as many pixels to cover a much larger area of sky in one shot and, by using newer technology than ISAAC, it has a greater sensitivity to faint infrared radiation [2]. Because HAWK-I can study galaxies stripped bare of the confusing effects ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Research rejects green tea for breast cancer prevention
