Teenage girls, alcohol and breast cancer risk

[tim-from-pa]

When I read the article, first off I was confused when the headline talks about breast cancer and then the article quickly switches to the idea that teenage girls that drink have a greater risk of "benign breast disease" whatever that all entails --- more medical double talk that I'm sure your tax dollars supports. Almost sounds like a "bait and switch" headline to catch your attention.

Of course ol' Tim here has the answers. The idea being promoted is that drinking is bad and the medical establishment's simple association games that "it must be the alcohol" and the solution is to "stay away from it". However, it is not all that simple --- I'll wager all my livestock that there's nutritional deficiencies going on here that alcohol (and many other things for that matter) exacerbate. Plus, when we are probably talking about 16-year-old teenage girls with 30-year-old boyfriends probably have a tendency to drink like a fish and party that don't strike me as the type who would think much about nutrition. Then, when they are 17, the stress of raising a baby alone adds to their ill health.

I'm one for keeping things simple, but in this case I can't help but to think there's a lot more to a story like this than "alcohol increases the risk of breast cancer" --- those who live such a lifestyle are probably doing many other things wrong.

Teenage girls up breast cancer risk with every alcoholic drink

 

[handy]

I have to agree Tim.

This is either a highly flawed study, or, possibly, a horribly written write up of it.

I read it about four times, and I'm not all that bad at gleaning information out of the written word.

Here's what I got:

Out of a whopping 6,741 women only 67 developed benign breast disease. That's a comforting number right there, we are talking about a very low risk, only .01%.

Out of that .01% we see that women whose mothers had breast cancer were twice as likely to have benign breast disease and also women whose mothers had benign breast disease saw their risk fact nearly doubled as well. So, out of 67 people we have to figure that most of these women had mothers who were either diagnosed with breast cancer or benign breast disease.

What they called, "the most important" of this study though is that girls whose mothers either had breast cancer or benign breast disease were more likely to develop benign breast disease if they drank alcohol.

I guess the bottom line is, if your a woman, and your mother had either breast cancer or benign breast disease, your chances of getting either is much higher...and that risk increases if you drink a lot. However, that is where the reporting gets murky....they've already reported that your chances of getting bbd is doubled if you have a mother with breast cancer or bbd. But, they don't say how high it goes if your mother has breast cancer or bbd and you drink, how much you drink...etc.

Since we're only talking about .01% of women anyway...and those with the highest risk factors were those with mothers who had breast cancer or bbd...I don't think this really impacts our girl's risks of alcohol as much as say...her risk of being sexually molested if she gets drunk, her risk of unplanned pregnancy if she gets drunk etc...

Either a non-story or a badly reported one.

 

[bigllama]

if you look at the website, there's a button where anyone can click to submit articles so any idiot on the internet can post their garbage on that site

 

[tim-from-pa]

if you look at the website, there's a button where anyone can click to submit articles so any idiot on the internet can post their garbage on that site

Yeah, I see that now --- that article came up under Google's search and it makes me wonder how that search engine can come up with tripe like this at times.

As much as I am suspicious of some medical practice, philosophy (specifically preventive) and Big Pharma, I guess I should give them the benefit of the doubt that even they would not put out a story this stupid.