Breast cancer "prevention"?

What about prevention? Preventive screening like mammography has recently received quite some attention. It is possible that such screening saves a life of one woman over 1,000 or 10,000, but at the same time a number of women get surgery when they did not need it. When a cancer at a very starting stage is found, in 30 % of cases it does not develop or it regresses.

The British Medical Journal published a study on about 90,000 women between 49 and 59 years of age showing that mammography does not have ANY impact on the risk of death by breast cancer. Women who had yearly mammography for 5 years did not have less risk of death than those who had simply a physical test. As a consequence of this study, the Swiss Medical Board declared that mammography was to be abandoned and recommended that women needed to be informed of the undesired effects of such test.

The first danger of a mammography is that by compressing the breast it can cause explosion of non dangerous micro-tumors and dissemination of deadly cancer cells in the body. Further, the breast is exposed to strong radiations. Dr Samuel Epstein, professor at the University of Illinois, expert of breast cancer, is against systemic mammography and states that during menopause the breast is very sensitive to radiations and each exposure to minimal radiation would increase the risk of breast cancer of 1%, i.e. 10 % in a year. Cancer diagnostic was been wrong up to 6% of  cases, meaning that 20 - 49 % women doing regular mammography tests would have a false positive after 10 tests.

Knowing or believing to have cancer can be an emotional shock that can lead to a real disease such eczema and cardiac attack. Women with a false or real positive test have to go through mostly un-necessary anxieties, biopsies, surgeries. Due to such high risks of mistake, side effects and to the zero improvement in lowering the risk of death, since 2009 in the US the Preventive Services Task Force has been asking women under 50 years of age to NOT do a routine mammography; the same agency used to ask women to have one every two years once they were 40!

 An alternative test is thermography, which measures the infrared emissions to obtain body images without irradiation. An alternative you can ask your general doctor or gynecologist about.

Nutrition recommendations to prevent and treat cancer:

Eat lots of veggies (especially broccoli and all the cruciferous vegetables including water cress) and fruits (especially lemons) every day (400 g day). Lemons contain monoterpenes that have been shown in 1998 to have chemoprotective and chemotherapeutic effects in breast tumors. Monoterpenes inhibit cell growths, cell cycle progression and a gene expression in breast cancer cell lines); green tea.

Turmeric has strong anti carcinogenic effects, as stated in different research works such the Cancer Prevention Research in 2008, where it was demonstrated that curcumine inhibits breast cancer cell mobility and propagation. In the medical journals Molecular Pharmacology and in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry in 2009 – 2011 it was observed that curcumine inhibits growth of pancreas cancer cells, increases sensitivity to chemotherapy, favors lung cancer cells death, aims to cancer cells strains and can be the solution to stop a brain cancer called glyoblastome.

Supplements (already posted in a previous post, but it never hurts to repeat): using magnesium regularly prevents cancer growth. Magnesium chloride allows the body to better face carcinogenic aggressions (Delbet).

Vitamin D acts against cancer by increasing the self destruction ability of mutating cells, by helping with cellular differentiation (lost in cancer cells) and by reducing angiogenesis (forming of new blood vessels around the cancer). Vitamin D, on the side, lowers the risk of autoimmunity diseases, seasonal depression, chronic fatigue  and neurodegenerative diseases. 

Fish oils (omega 3 are anti-carcinogenic).

And further, supplements helping in bearing the side effects of treatments (from Dr. Hertoghe):
- coenzyme Q10 (as ubiquinol) 100- 400 mg/day
- Selenium 200 μg / day
- Vitamin A (retionol acetate) liposoluble 50 000- 200 000 UI /day or 25 - 100 mg/day
- Vitamin C : 1 - 2 g /day   


Do a lot of exercise. Exercise would lower the risk of breast cancer to 30% compared to inactive women, as stated in the journals British Journal of Cancer and Onkologie and Cancer Causes Control.
Sport activates the autophagic mechanisms to destroy the daily cellular waste.