Breast cancer can occur in different parts of the breast, including the milk ducts, lobules, or (rarely) connective tissues, and cancers can be either invasive or noninvasive. Ductal cancer is the most common type of breast cancer, attributing to almost 70% of all breast cancer cases. Lobular cancer, on the other hand, affects approximately 10–15% of breast cancer cases. Furthermore, some cancer cells obtain their energy from women’s naturally occurring hormones—estrogen and progesterone. Breast cancers can be estrogen receptor-positive (cancer cells use estrogen to grow), progesterone receptor-positive (cancer cells use progesterone to grow), or hormone receptor-negative (the cancer does not grow using hormonal cells).

Using the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study, lead researcher Dr. Christopher Li and colleagues observed 87,724 postmenopausal women in their study to measure their likelihood of developing breast cancer subtypes. Women were between the ages of 50 and 79 years from 1993 to 1998, were cancer-free, and had self-reported on their alcohol consumption at the time of their initial consultation. Women were classified as nondrinkers, prior drinkers, or current drinkers. Women who were considered current drinkers were grouped into six categories, depending on how much alcohol they consumed. Alcohol consumption ranged from a maximum of 1 drink per week to at least 14 drinks per week.

Then, the researchers followed up with the women in September 2005 to assess the prevalence of various breast cancer types. A total of 2,944 cases of invasive breast cancer were diagnosed among the study’s sample. Researchers evaluated this group’s tumor subtype status, hormone status, family medical history, reproductive history, demographics, alcohol consumption, and lifestyle. As a result, alcohol consumption shared a positive relationship with invasive breast cancer overall, as well as invasive lobular cancer and hormone receptor-positive tumors. Compared to nondrinkers, women who were current drinkers and consumed an average of seven or more drinks per week had a doubled risk of hormone receptor-positive invasive lobular breast cancer. However, the researchers did not find a significant disparity among drinkers and nondrinkers’ risk when it came to ductal type breast cancer, the most common subtype.

The researchers’ study affirms the findings of previous research that have linked alcohol consumption with an increased risk of hormone receptor-positive subtypes than hormone receptor-negative subtypes, as well as increased risk of lobular cancer. Although the researchers note that alcohol consumption levels of the study’s diagnosed women were not reevaluated following their initial report, they suggest that a distinct relationship exists between alcohol use and breast cancer risk. These women did not appear to have heightened levels of risk based on their varying levels of alcohol consumption, but being current alcohol consumers alone put them at a twofold risk of these specific breast cancer subtypes.

Source: Medical News Today, Alcohol Consumption Linked To Subtypes Of Breast Cancer, But Not All, August 24, 2010

The University of Florida News reports that the study is the first to demonstrate secondhand and thirdhand exposure to heroin and other opium products in Afghanistan. Bruce Goldberger, a professor of pathology and psychiatry with the University of Florida College of Medicine and director of the William R. Maples Center for Forensic Medicine, will present preliminary findings of the two-year study today during the 27th annual International Drug Enforcement Conference in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Top drug law enforcement officials from 88 countries will be at the meeting.

Goldberger and Dr. Mark Gold, the Donald Dizney Eminent Scholar and chairman of the department of psychiatry, two leading experts on drug abuse, were selected by the State Department to conduct the research.

The resulting data will aid the effort to reduce demand for narcotics and prevent drug abuse in Afghanistan.

The researchers drew on their 10-year effort to develop laboratory models and protocols for measuring harmful exposure to tobacco smoke to estimate secondhand exposure to opium products through inhalation and thirdhand exposure through contact with contaminated surfaces.

“The research team has an interest in the health and welfare of the women and children of Afghanistan who are innocently exposed to opium and opium products,” Goldberger said. “We have demonstrated that second- and thirdhand exposure to opium and opium products can result in serious health consequences, including addiction.”

Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s illegal supply of opium, the drug from which heroin is made, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. But little is known about the abuse of opium and other drugs in the Afghan population.
To learn more, the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs bureau of the State Department funded the study as part of its drug abuse and trafficking prevention work with the Afghanistan Ministry of Counter Narcotics.

The researchers obtained samples of indoor air, surfaces, and hair from women and children in homes where family members smoked opium and heroin.

Hair samples from the women and children were positive for opium products, as well as several synthetic opioids. In addition, opium products were present in indoor air samples and household surfaces such as floors, tables, toys and bedding with which children came into regular contact. The presence of synthetic opioid compounds suggests that the use of prescription drugs might also be a problem. Such exposure puts children at risk of abnormal development, including failure of the brain and lungs to grow properly. Such developmental delays can make it hard for children to pay attention and learn.

“There are critical periods in organ, body and brain development that can easily be hijacked by a toxic environment,” Gold said. “Our efforts are aimed at giving each child a chance to develop and grow to his or her potential.”

As has been proved for tobacco smoke, researchers suspect that adverse effects can also pop up in unexpected ways, such as in the development of bladder cancer.

Preliminary results show consistently that in more than 90 percent of study homes, indoor air, surfaces and residents’ hair contained opium and opium products.

The researchers will release more detailed results later and perform further analyses to get a clearer picture of the drug abuse problem in Afghanistan. To help address the issue, the study might expand to include culturally sensitive drug education and prevention programs.

The State Department has released a fact sheet on the study at www.state.gov/p/inl/rls/fs/140668.htm.

Information provided by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) indicates that approximately 5.1 percent of all adult women (approximately 5.9 million) needed alcohol treatment in 2008. This number has stayed relatively steady since 2002, but several characteristics of the population have changed between 1992 and 2007.

Overall the number of female substance abuse treatment admissions increased between 1997 and 2002, from 27.4 percent to 32.5 percent. However, the number of women reporting alcohol as the primary reason for treatment declined from 47.4 percent to 33.4 percent.

Use of secondary and tertiary substances with alcohol as the primary substance also decreased, from 19.2 percent to 14.9 percent.

The trends also show an increase in age among those women admitted for alcohol abuse treatment. The mean age in 1992 was 34.1 years, while in 2002 the mean age was 37.9 years.

There was little change in the racial and ethnic components of female adults admitted for substance abuse. There were increases in the proportion of adult female primary alcohol admissions that never married (from 35.4 to 45.1 percent) and had some college education (from 26.5 to 33.0 percent).

Between 1992 and 2007 the principal sources of referrals for adult female admissions remained stable. The most common types of referrals were self-referral and referrals from the justice system.

While reporting a psychiatric problem at admission is a voluntary item in the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS) system, there was a significant increase in psychiatric problems reported among female adult admissions between 1992 and 2007. The percentage almost doubled, from 17.7 percent to 33.6 percent.

Another important component of treatment for alcohol and substance abuse is the transferring of an admission to another level of treatment or the completion of a treatment program. In 2007, almost two-thirds of adult female discharges with alcohol abuse as the primary treatment program completed treatment or transferred to another level of care.

One notable aspect of these findings is that the number of admissions for primary alcohol abuse has declined from 1992 to 2007, even though the number of women needing treatment for alcohol abuse has remained relatively stable. This information indicates a need for additional alcohol and substance abuse screening in multiple settings.

Additionally, the findings indicate the importance of age and gender screening, along with psychiatric screenings for female adult admissions for alcohol abuse treatment.
 

“It is dangerous at best, and completely wrong at worst, to assume that any neurological disorder has the same underlying causes in men and women, and thus to assume that treatments for the disorder will be essentially the same,” said Larry Cahill, PhD, in the Psychiatric Times.

Cahill is an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior at the School of Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine. “Yet that is precisely the assumption that continues to pervade much of both the clinically applied and basic science worlds.”

Jill Becker, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, noted that women begin using drugs at lower doses than men. In addition, drug use in women escalates more rapidly to addiction than men and they face a greater risk of relapse after abstinence. At the same time, women tend to enter treatment sooner after dependence develops.

Studies have also shown that there is a direct association between the menstrual cycle and substance abuse. Testing has found that fluctuations in steroid hormone levels during the menstrual cycle affect neural responses to rewards.

The same tests demonstrated that when men anticipate an uncertain reward, there was more activity in the ventral putamen than women. When receiving a reward, women showed more activity than men in the anterior medical prefrontal cortex.

While gender has been examined for years in terms of treatment methods and doses, this latest research could help to lead to better understanding of the differences in the addiction for men versus women and how to more effectively treat according to these differences.