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Radiation therapy can lead to later breast cancer

Radiation treatment has saved countless children from lymphoma, leukemia, soft-tissue tumors and other cancer types, but it can damage the DNA of healthy cells, too, and lead to cancer decades later.

Study finds breast cancer risk in women treated with radiation as kids, even at lower doses Winnipeg Free Press, By: Marilynn Marchione, The Associated Press 06/4/2012  CHICAGO – Women treated with chest radiation for cancer when they were girls have a higher risk of developing breast cancer than previously thought, doctors warn.

Even lower doses of radiation therapy posed a risk for survivors of a childhood cancer — something not known before, researchers found…
“We find that by age 50, approximately 30 per cent of women treated with radiation for Hodgkin lymphoma” as girls have developed breast cancer, said Chaya Moskowitz, a biostatistician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York who led the study.
That is far higher than the 4 per cent rate for the general
population, and is comparable to the rate in women who have mutations
in inherited BRCA genes that increase risk. Among women who had chest
radiation for any type of childhood cancer, 24 per cent developed
breast cancer by age 50.
The study was to be presented Monday at an American Society of
Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago.
Radiation treatment has saved countless children from lymphoma, leukemia, soft-tissue tumors and other cancer types, but it can damage the DNA of healthy cells, too, and lead to cancer decades later.
Children treated today get much lower doses and to much smaller areas
of the body than kids did in 1970 to 1986 when the women in this study
were girls……
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/home_family/study-finds-breast-cancer-risk-in-women-treated-with-radiation-as-kids-even-at-lower-doses-156971925.html

June 6, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, women