Category Archives: Oral contraceptives

The causes of cancer you can control

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Can cancer be prevented? Decades of research have shown that a person’s chances of getting cancer depends on a mishmash of their genes and their environment, but also certain aspects of their lives, many of which they can control.

Today saw the publication of a landmark Cancer Research UK-funded review by Professor Max Parkin, outlining the latest evidence behind the preventable causes of UK cancers.

As our press release says, these latest calculations, based on predicted cases  for 2010, show that smoking, diet, alcohol and obesity are behind more than 100,000 cancers. This is equivalent to one third of all cancers diagnosed in the UK each year.

And this figure further increases to around 134,000 when taking into account all 14 lifestyle and environmental risk factors analysed in this study.

There’s more in-depth information about the statistics on our website, and our healthy living pages explain the take-home messages from the research.

But to help make sense of the vast quantity of information contained in the 91-page report, we’ve also put together a graphic that shows the proportion of cancers that can be prevented through lifestyle changes. It’s worth spending a minute or so looking at the key to understand how to interpret the graphic (which you can download as a larger PDF version).

Attributable risk infographic

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The Pill and prostate cancer

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The Pill

Latest research does not suggest the Pill causes prostate cancer

This morning we woke up to headlines proclaiming that women taking the Pill could increase the risk of… prostate cancer.

That might sound silly – women don’t even have prostates, after all – but it seemed to be what the study concluded.

But as quite often happens, it’s not quite as simple a story as it seems. Let’s take a look at what the researchers actually did, and what they concluded.
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The Pill, pregnancy and cancer – making sense of the headlines

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Are all ‘side effects’ bad for your health? In the case of the birth control Pill, it seems not.

Today, a study that we helped fund has confirmed that the combined Pill isn’t just an effective contraceptive, but that it also gives women long-lasting protection against ovarian cancer. Women who took the Pill for any length of time had a 14 per cent lower risk of ovarian cancer than those who never took it.

And women in the study who’d taken the Pill for 10 years were almost half as likely to develop ovarian cancer compared with women who’d taken it for less than 1 year. The below graphic shows how many women this equated to:

The study has been widely covered in the media, and these headline statistics are likely to be reassuring for the many thousands of women who take the Pill in the UK and across the world.

And women who have had kids also have reason to be positive – the study also confirmed that they have a reduced risk of ovarian cancer. Women in the study who’d been pregnant had their risk of ovarian cancer reduced by almost one-third (29 per cent), compared with women who hadn’t.

But what should an ‘average’ woman conclude from these numbers? Can any explicit advice be given based on the evidence? Continue reading →

Oestrogen causes DNA mutations – is this how it fuels cancer?

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Oestrogen can lead to mutations in DNA, according to new research from Cancer Research UK

Oestrogen can lead to mutations in DNA, according to new research by Cancer Research UK scientists

The evidence that the sex hormone oestrogen is involved in cancer is overwhelming.

For example, breast cancer is more common among women who take HRT and the Pill for long periods, both of which add oestrogen to the body’s natural levels. And this most common of cancers is intimately linked to levels of the hormone over a woman’s life.

Oestrogen is also involved in cancers of the womb and ovaries, and, potentially, prostate cancer.

But we understand little about exactly how oestrogen affects the internal chemistry of our cells so that they become more likely to divide out of control. Several theories have been put forward, but scientists are still working hard to figure this out.

Some think that oestrogen encourages certain cell types to divide more often, and that the increase in cancer risk can be explained by the simple fact that more cell divisions means a greater likelihood of cancer-causing mistakes being made.

Others think that oestrogen turns on certain genes inside cells at the wrong time, and that this encourages cancer – for example, by preventing damaged cells from dying.

And finally, there’s laboratory evidence that oestrogen can directly bind to, and damage, DNA – although quite whether this occurs in real life, is far from clear.

But new research published today by Cancer Research UK scientists, with support from a team in Spain, adds a new theory to the mix – one that’s as least as strong as the others. And intriguingly, their research points the finger at the immune system, the body’s in-built self-defence mechanism.

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