HRT and breast cancer
New research has concluded that the risk of developing breast cancer from hormone replacement therapy is twice as high as previously thought, reports The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). HRT is used by millions of women around the world to relieve the symptoms of menopause, which include hot flashes and night sweats, and scientists have known of the treatment’s link to cancer since the early 2000s. To better gauge that risk, researchers analyzed data from 58 previous HRT studies, which included more than 100,000 postmenopausal women with invasive breast cancer. The metastudy revealed that the general risk of breast cancer for women ages 50 to 69 who have not taken HRT is 6.3 percent. But for women on the most common form of HRT—estrogen and daily progestogen— the risk jumps to 8.3 percent, equivalent to one extra cancer case per 50 users. The risk rises to 6.8 percent for those on estrogenonly therapy, and 7.7 percent for those taking progestogen every two or three days. The risk goes up the longer a woman is on HRT and persists even a decade after treatment stops. “We don’t want to be unduly alarming,” says co-author Richard Peto, from the University of Oxford. “But we don’t want to be unduly reassuring.”
because of his terrible diet, according to a new study. The unnamed British teen ate nothing but French fries, Pringles, sausages, processed ham slices, and white bread for the past decade, and first visited a doctor at age 14 complaining of “tiredness,” reports The Washington Post. He was given B12 shots and dietary advice and sent home, but by age 15 was starting to suffer from hearing and vision loss—symptoms that mystified doctors. At 17, he was declared legally blind, and doctors discovered that he still had a B12 deficiency, as well as low levels of copper, selenium, and vitamin D. The teen was diagnosed with nutritional optic neuropathy, a disorder of the optic nerve that in developed nations is caused mostly by chronic alcoholism and medications that interfere with the absorption of nutrients. It is rarely a result of poor diet, because nutritious food is readily available in the West. The case shows the importance of eating “a varied diet,” said study lead author Denize Atan, from Bristol Eye Hospital in England. “There is not a single food that will provide all the vitamins and minerals you need.”
supplementation experiment,” reports the New Scientist, in which they dropped McDonald’s burgers near crows’ nests in rural Clinton, N.Y. Sure enough, the junk food–munching birds’ cholesterol levels were about 5 percent higher than those of nearby crows that hadn’t been fed burgers. Whether that extra cholesterol is bad for the crows isn’t clear—there was no evidence that it affected mortality rates. “We know that excessive cholesterol causes disease in humans,” says lead researcher Andrea Townsend, from Hamilton College in Clinton. “But we don’t know what level would be ‘excessive’ in a wild bird.”