Groundbreaking breast cancer research is being presented this week at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in Washington D.C. Three studies present findings on breast density and its relationship to breast cancer risk. Researchers also found disturbing evidence that a mother's bad diet could not only affect her daughter's risk for breast cancer, but also her granddaughter's.

DENSER MEANS DEADLIER FOR BREAST CANCER

Several independent reports found that women who have a higher breast density also have a higher risk of breast cancer. In fact, research has found that women who have a breast density of 75 percent or more, which is measured with imaging, carry a risk of breast cancer four to five times greater than women with little or no density.
"These [studies] strengthen the observation that high breast density is associated with increased risk for breast cancer, and they strengthen the hypothesis that under some conditions, reducing breast density may be associated with reduced risk for breast cancer," said Carol Fabian, professor and director of the Breast Cancer Prevention Center at the University of Kansas Medical Center in a statement.

Mammographic density is essentially the white areas - radio-dense - in a mammogram image. A woman's density is a measurement of the non-fatty tissue in the breast, explained Celine Vachon, professor at the Mayo Clinic and principal investigator for one of these studies.

Vachon's research found that a decrease in breast density over a six-year period may indicate a decreased risk of breast cancer compared with women whose breast density remained the same.

Her study used data from the Mayo Mammography Health Study, which included 19,924 women who had a mammogram at the Mayo Clinic between 2003 and 2006. The patients were all older than 35 years and had never had breast cancer.

Breast density was gathered from the oldest mammogram available for the patients and from the mammogram that was given upon enrollment to the study. This image used Breast Imaging-Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS), which is a tool used to measure clinical density. The categories used for measurements include breasts that are almost all fat, scattered density, heterogeneous density and extremely dense, Vachon explained.

Vachon and her team discovered that women who had a reduction in at least one BI-RADS category over the six-year study, decreased their breast cancer risk by 28 percent.

"The most important aspect [of this study] is that if a woman changes one of those categories - at least one - she has a 28 percent reduced risk [of breast cancer]," Vachon told DOTmed News.

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