Do European women have higher rates of breast cancer than American women?

[CTyankee]

I've been wondering this since my daughter told me her doctor said having more than 5 alcoholic drinks per week heightened her risk of getting breast cancer (none is in our family).

It's interesting: when I have been in Italy, Spain, France and Portugal I have seen women drinking wine at their meals, both at lunch and at dinner (and in between in cafes). I'm guessing that Greece would be the same. That would add up to more than 5 per week it would seem to me, but I can't say my anecdotal experiences are in any way scientific!

Are there any stats on this?

[MannyGoldstein]

1. Probably not good stats but

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_bre_can_inc-health-breast-cancer-incidence

It's hard to do this well for breast cancer, for technical reasons that I can explain if you're really interested.

Note that Japan's incidence is very low, which I suspect is due to high iodine intake.

[CTyankee]

3. Is high intake of iodine OK?

[MannyGoldstein]

9. That't not totally clear

The Japanese get a *lot* of iodine - about 14 mg per day on average, almost 100 times the US recommended daily allowance and roughly 20 times the level that's considered dangerous. Yet the Japanes have the longest life expectancy of any major country, and extremely low rates of breast and prostate cancer. There's reason to believe that these cancers are linked to iodine deficiency.

Most of the industrialized world has an iodine deficiency, for various reasons.

However, there's also evidence that high iodine intake can be bad.

More info: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ISW/is_269/ai_n15931014/?tag=content;col1

[SPedigrees]

2. The mediterranean diet refutes what your dau's teach said.

Here's a wild guess: The US diet for average citizens now includes huge amounts of fructose (GM corn) and almost zero amounts of green vegies and/or dairy products and seafood. Can't be healthy.

I'd guess that having more than 5 fructose-sweetened soft drinks would be a more likely cause.

[bemildred]

4. The doctor is full of shit.

Ask yourself "How does he know that?" It's a stupid statement. He could say drinking too much is bad for you, an indisputable fact, but he wants to claim authority, so he sets arbitrary limits and make unsupported assertions about them.

[CTyankee]

5. It's a woman and she's at a very respected practice in the Boston, MA area.

I've seen this stat before in popular literature. My guess is that this doc didn't want any vulnerability to lawsuits and just quoted this stat to her patients to help keep her liability insurance rates down...

[bemildred]

6. Then she is full of shit.

She still has no way to know that.

[CTyankee]

7. I have seen this in some of the literature and questioned it.

My dtr doesn't really question it from the breast cancer POV but from a weight concern...alcohol can really put on weight...but it sounds better to her from a "health" point of view...that's how that works, I guess...

Me? I just enjoy my red wine with dinner, with my cardiologist's blessing...I couldn't care less...

[bemildred]

8. You are not full of shit.

Alcohol is a poison, as are most drugs, at a sufficient dosage. Sometimes one is even given given drugs at toxic dosages for therapeutic reasons. What the toxic dosage is depends on many different factors, age weight, genetics, etc., and how that toxicity might manifest itself in a particular case is even more obscure.

There seems to be a developing consensus that moderate use of alcohol might even be good for you, even though I would suggest that too is full of shit, at best talking in vague generalities about abstractions of dubious real meaning. Nobody really even agrees about what "moderate" means in that context.

However, as you point out, "it is said" that a couple drinks a day is "good for your heart" and that is almost three times 5 drinks a week.

Certainly a regular drinking habit can lead to weight gain, but so can lots of other things, if one wants to address weight control, one ought not single out booze.

I do not recommend that anyone drink, it can be a pernicious habit, and it can be hard to control, but one ought to address people in a rational way instead of trying to scare them into doing what you think is the right thing.

[CTyankee]

10. Your reasoning is well thought out, but what I am questioning is the application of it

to such countries as France, Italy and Spain where wine is consumed in larger quantities than here. If your line of reasoning works here, shouldn't it work in those countries, as well? Is their rate of alcoholism as high as the rate in the U.S.? Is the rate of breast cancer higher than in the U.S.?

I really don't know. That is why I am asking the question about scientific evidence one way or the other.

:shrug:

[bemildred]

11. I don't believe that "European Women" is a category one can make sensible assertions about.

I would be highly skeptical about the idea that the drinking habits of Europeans, as a generality, are something you can make meaningful assertions about either. The only thing Europeans have in common is that they live in some country in the rather arbitrary region we denote "Europe". The notion that you can use statistical methods to isolate the effects of 5 drinks a week on breast cancer prevalence and morbidity is so fatuous that it beggars description. Why not 4 drinks a week? Or six? Is it four drinks a week for liver disease, but five for breast cancer and 10 for leukemia? It's babble, based on nothing but a deep desire to appear to be an expert. It is easy to collect "data" and do statistical calculations on it, but it doesn't as such mean squat. Defining a meaningful population and collecting good samples from it are arcane arts, and so is interpreting the statistical results. It is not a mechanical process. Just because you have a pile of data, that does not mean there is a "population" that it came from in which the attributes that you sampled are the relevant ones. Statistics is used far too much these days as a sort of mumbo-jumbo to give credibility to bullshit.

[CTyankee]

12. I understand what you are saying. However, statistics are kept by public health agencies, so I

assume there is some use to keeping them. Also, alcoholism is constantly being studied as a public health problem. It would make some sense to me to have some kind of comparison (and I agree with you it would have to be more scientifically conducted that just by using a vague "European woman" category). I am not a scientist but I do know that various populations are studied for all kinds of health issues: obesity, diet, intake of sodium, etc. Why not alcohol intake?

[bemildred]

14. I've said what I have to say, I think.

It's been nice talking with you.

[bemildred]

15. PS, I drink myself, I've always been too fond of beer, with all the usual tragic results.

So I'm not in any way trying to criticize or insult you in that regard.
:-)

[CTyankee]

16. I know you're not. And I meant no criticism of you, either....

It is entirely rational to be skeptical of such broad statements (like the one I made!). Whenever another "study" comes out I always look to see the size of the study and the length of the study...

[GoneOffShore]

13. The studies linking breast cancer and alcohol would seem,

According to an oncologist I spoke to recently, to be "soft data".

A Pub Med search gives a study linking some recurrence to post menopausal, obese women who drink alcohol.

on edit:

He also said that having a glass or two of red wine would have more benefits in terms of heart health than the risks of recurrence.