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Passive Smoke Cancer Risk for Young Women

Posted on: Thursday, 10 March 2005, 06:00 CST

Passive smoking causes breast cancer, particularly in younger women.

The study, commissioned by the Californian Air Resources Board, is one of the first to suggest that smoke is a cause of the disease, which affects one in nine women.

It found that women exposed to second-hand smoke have up to a 90 per cent greater risk of developing breast cancer.

Scientists analysed exposure to second-hand smoke and more than 1,000 studies on its health effects.

The findings challenge the majority of studies which have found no connection between female smokers and breast cancer.

Experts believe the 1,200page report could have a significant impact on cancer research and anti-smoking laws.

However, the report did not estimate the number of additional new breast cancer cases or calculate the risk based on actual doses of second-hand smoke.

Laboratory tests have already found that chemicals from cigarettes cause breast cancer in animals but until now major public health groups have not linked the two in humans.

Scientists have developed a breast cancer vaccine that could soon be tested on human patients following successful animal experimentsThe vaccine helps the immune system to target a protein called mammaglobinA, which is found in 80 per cent of breast tumours.

In mice, immune cells primed by the vaccine caused tumours with the protein to shrink. Other tumours engineered to lack the protein were not affected.

Scientists at Washington University and the Siteman Cancer Centre in St Louis, USA, made the vaccine from copies of the DNA sequence that makes mammaglobin-A.

The aim was to 'flag-up' mammaglobin-A to the immune system so that it recognised the protein as a foreign molecule.

Body defenders called Tcells would then multiply and attack tumour cells displaying mammaglobin-A.

Dr Thalachallour Mohanakumar, one of the scientists conducting the research, said: 'Mammaglobin-A is involved in breast development and secreted in breast milk, so we had to prove first that we could elicit an immune response to a protein that is in the body normally.'

'Now that we've found how effectively an immune response can be generated to mammaglobin-A, we plan to conduct clinical trials in patients who are at very high risk for breast cancer and in patients who have had a relapse after initial treatment,' said Dr Mohanakumar

Source: Birmingham Post; Birmingham (UK)

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