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A NEW STUDY has found that high cholesterol could put women at risk of breast cancer.
It also found that the cholesterol-lowering drugs, statins, may cut the risk.
The findings are based on patient data from over 660,000 women in the UK over a 14 year period.
It found that the risk of breast cancer was almost doubled in those with abnormally high levels of blood fats.
However, the research is still at an early stage and the findings do not prove that cholesterol helps trigger breast cancer.
Doctor Rahul Potluri is a cardiologist at Aston University in Birmingham, he led the study:
Our preliminary study suggests that women with high cholesterol in their blood may be at greater risk of getting breast cancer.
“It raises the possibility of preventing breast cancer with statins, which lower cholesterol, but as this is a primitive study, significant time and research is needed before this idea can be tested.
He added that statins are cheap, widely available and relatively safe. They’re already known to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Obesity
Over the past few years, studies have found a link between obesity and breast cancer.
Last year a study in mice found that lowering circulating cholesterol or interfering with its metabolism may be used to prevent or treat breast cancer.
Dr Potluri said: “We have a general principle that obesity is linked to breast cancer and a study in mice suggested that this may be because of cholesterol.
“We decided to investigate whether there was any association between hyperlipidaemia, which is essentially high cholesterol, and breast cancer.”
Research
The researchers used a statistical model to study the association between hyperlipidaemia and breast cancer.
They found that having hyperlipidaemia increased the risk of breast cancer by 1.64 times.
Dr Potluri said, “We found that women with high cholesterol had a significantly greater chance of developing breast cancer.
This was an observational study so we can’t conclude that high cholesterol causes breast cancer but the strength of this association warrants further investigation.
A prospective study is now needed to monitor the risk of breast cancer in women with and without high cholesterol.
If it confirms a connection between high cholesterol and breast cancer then the next step would be to see if lowering cholesterol with statins can reduce the risk of developing cancer.
Dr Potluri said a clinical trial may be needed:
We are potentially heading towards a clinical trial in 10-15 years to test the effect of statins on the incidence of breast cancer.
“If such a trial is successful, statins may have a role in the prevention of breast cancer especially in high risk groups, such as women with high cholesterol.”
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Any new research is to be welcomed I suppose. But after watching a well received programme called ‘Statin nation’ I really am highly suspicious of this whole cholesterol topic. It seems many of the top cardiologists think it’s bullshit too.
Also worth noting that this is a “correlation”, not a “link”.
Yes, always be wary when the evidence relies on corellation. Here are some funny corrrelations… http://twentytwowords.com/funny-graphs-show-correlation-between-completely-unrelated-stats-9-pictures/ Though it is hardly ground breaking that high cholesterol has negative impacts on your health
And the most famous correlation of all, that of the rise in global warming and the decline in the numbers of pirates.
Ramen.
Cholesterol is vital for all kinds of things like making Vitamin D and statin drugs can interfere with this. Clean up your diet and people will not need these drugs.
Did they differentiate between LDL and HDL cholesterol? I’ve never seen this moderator variable consider in such studies .. did they factor in other risk factors as simply being obese, poor diet, smoking (which would all naturally result in high cholesterol). Many perfectly healthy people have high cholesterol, and in particular women are more likely to measure higher. I wonder aloud if when these population is separated from those that are obviously at risk, does a similarly statistically significant result materialise?
Your liver makes cholesterol in times of stress. So while diet can make a large difference, so can stress.
Ultimately stress is related to far more diseases than we would care to mention and the habits we develop to cope with it are more damaging again..
Whenever I hear of a study concluding that statins are the answer, the first question I ask is who is funding it. More often than not, it’s the statin manufacturers themselves.
Not this one. The large drug companies have made their billions on statins. They aren’t that interested in them anymore as they have all come off patent, and people buy generics.
If I was a woman I’d be steering clear of dairy products.. The biggest study ever carried out on diet and nutrition “The China study” found woman in China consumed around 50% less Milk than your average American and British Woman, but they had only 1/5 the levels of Breast cancer.. Cows are constantly pregnated to produce milk which means their milk is full of hormones.. A good majority of breast cancer is hormonal so a good start woukd be to stop putting Animal hormones into your body..
That applies to American milk, but not European. The European Union has banned the use of and importation of beef products contaminated with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) for the reasons you outline.
We pay a fine to the WTO for doing so, but at least our livestock are hormone free.
All cows milk has hormones in it you clown..
And the natural amounts found in milk are quite low, unless you’re milking the cow late in a pregnancy.
Traces of rBGH on the other hand are pretty high, hence why the EU told pretty much every other nation to feck off with their bovine produce because we don’t want any of that carcinogenic synthetic muck pumped into our cows!
The reporting of this study is rubbish. We don’t know what the effect of giving statins to women with high cholesterol is.
The study found a correlation between raised cholesterol and breast cancer. It didn’t examine the role of statins.
We do know that being obese increases the risk of breast cancer, we know that being obese increases the likelihood of having high cholesterol. Maybe it’s obesity, not high cholesterol that is the risk factor – and statins don’t cure obesity.
So unhealthy people have higher rates of cancer. Shocking. Throw another ten million at them and they can tell us more obvious things.
At the risk of being labelled a cynic, I would be very interested to know where the funding for this study has come from. There seems to be no mention of this in the article. Perhaps the Journal could find this out. Until the source of funding is revealed I will be taking these findings with a large pinch of salt (metaphorical, of course!).
Robert Rusk above makes a very valid point about the link between stress and raised cholestrol. Perhaps stress is one of the causes of the increased incidence of many typesof cancer at present. The austerity measures are hitting families very hard, with a corresponding increase in the level of stress, I would say, Statins are all very well, but they seem to be being pushed quite vigorously as a perventative as well as a treatment.
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