Drinking Teen Aged Girls More likely to Develop Breast Related Problems
Teenage girls who consume alcohol frequently are more likely to develop non cancerous breast disease in their 20s and possibly breast cancer later in their lives.
The 12th April online edition of Pediatrics journal noted that girls who drank the most alocohol during their teen years were five times more likely to develop benign breast disease as young adults than others who never drank or drank rarely.
Benign breast disease (BBD) includes a number of nonmalignant conditions including fibroadenoma which is a non cancerous tumour. This is most common on those who are in their 30s or younger. Study co-author Catherine Berkey, a biostatistician at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said that benign breast disease is known to boost the risk for breast cancer. "Our study may suggest that teen drinking increases the risk for breast cancer, whether in all females or in those who go on to develop BBD, but longer-term follow-up is certainly required" to confirm it, she said.
The unique aspect of this study was that the girls who were studied were in their teens compared to other studies where the ladies recalled their drinking habits of early life.
The study involved 6,899 women who had become participants in the "Growing Up Today Study" when they were 9 to 15 years old. Information on alcoholic beverage consumption was collected in a follow-up survey when the participants were 16 to 23 years old, and a survey done when they were 18 to 27 years old included questions on breast disease.
The diagnosis of the benign breast disease and drinking showed that the risk for benign breast disease rose as the frequency of alcohol consumption increased, rom a 1.5 increased risk for drinking one or two days per week, to a three times greater risk for those drinking three to five days per week, and to a 5.5 times greater risk for drinking six or seven days per week, when compared with those who never drank or who drank less than once per week. Even girls who drink not so regularly like once a week might not be safe.
