Women With the Strongest Bones Have Higher Risk of Breast Cancer
From Times staff and wire reports
The strength of a woman’s bones may be the most powerful predictor of her risk of breast cancer.
For the second time in recent months, a study found that older women with very strong, healthy bones run a sharply higher risk of breast cancer.
“The suspected link is estrogen--not the kind that doctors give you when you enter menopause but the kind that is naturally occurring . . . during a woman’s premenopausal years,” Dr. Douglas Kiel said.
Kiel, a geriatrics specialist at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged in Boston, is co-author of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine. It found that older women with the strongest bones have almost four times the breast cancer risk of women with weak bones.
