Alcohol raises HRT breast cancer risk: study

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Women taking hormone replacement
therapy (HRT) should avoid drinking alcohol because it can
raise their risk of developing the most common kind of breast
cancer, Swedish scientists said on Tuesday.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet said they saw an
increased incidence of estrogen positive breast cancer, the
most common type of disease, especially among women who drank
alcohol and took hormones to relieve symptoms of the menopause.

“Our results suggest that women taking hormones should
avoid alcohol,” said Professor Alicja Wolk, whose team have
published their findings in the U.S. Journal of the National
Cancer Institute. The journal will come out on Wednesday.

“For those women who have to take hormones, what they can
do is avoid alcohol so it will not have a multiplier effect on
the risk for cancer,” she added to Reuters.

Many women have stopped or avoided taking HRT after
research published in 2002 showed it can raise the risk of
heart attack, stroke, breast cancer and other serious
conditions.

The Karolinska study also looked further at how alcohol in
general increased the risk of breast cancer.

Wolk said the Karolinska research showed that the increased
risk was also for estrogen receptor positive breast cancer, not
for the less common estrogen receptor negative type.

Wolk and her colleagues evaluated data on alcohol
consumption collected from 1987 to 1990 and again in 1997 from
51,847 postmenopausal women. By mid-2004, 1,188 breast cancer
patients were identified.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide.

More than a million cases occur each year and about 400,000
women die of the disease, according to the International Agency
for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France.

Having a family history of breast cancer, an early puberty,
late menopause, obesity and not having children can increase
the risk of developing the illness.