New York Times health columnist Jane Brody speaks at the Cornell Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology (ICET) symposium on breast cancer risks Sept. 29 at the Triphammer Lodge and Conference Center. Her lecture "The Real Breast Cancer Risks" met with opposition from some audience members. Denise Weldon/University Photography
On the eve of October's Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Cornell Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology (ICET) convened a symposium of individuals who already were aware of the disease's causes and effects. After hearing up-to-date reports on breast cancer's risk factors, symposium participants drafted 30 specific recommendations to redirect future research, improve education and communication, and shape public policy.
The Sept. 29 to 30 symposium at the Triphammer Lodge and Conference Center, "The Science that Drives Policy: Pesticides, Diet and Breast Cancer," attracted over 120 participants from among breast cancer advocacy groups, government, industry, health-care providers, news media and universities.
One worrisome but intriguing fact provoked discussion throughout the symposium, which was organized by members of Cornell's Breast Cancer Environmental Risk Factors (BCERF) program: Fewer than 50 percent of breast cancer cases can be traced to scientifically established risk factors, such as family history of breast cancer, early menarche and late age of menopause, late age at first birth or advancing age. The hundreds of thousands of "unexplained" breast cancer cases each year are intensifying both scientists' and the public's attention to the possible role of so-called environmental risk factors, such as diet, lifestyle and pesticide exposure.
But if breast cancer activists were hoping for smoking-gun evidence of a proven link between pesticide exposure and their disease, they were disappointed. As Columbia University epidemiologist Marilie Gammon put it, "current data are inconclusive" in the question of exposure to organochlorine compounds, including DDT and DDE as well as PCBs. "Data coming out in coming years should help us disentangle these associations," she added.
One epidemiologist who was certain of a lifestyle link was Banoo Parpia, a researcher in the Cornell-China-Oxford Project that studies diet and disease among Chinese populations in rural and urban environments. That international study attributes low breast-cancer rates among rural Chinese (and relatively high rates in the U.S. and some other Western nations) mainly to diet, Parpia reported, stating, "Plant-based diets that are low in processed foods, salt and fat will protect against not only breast cancer but many other cancers."
And some breast cancer activists who feel more focus should be put on risk factors such as chemical exposure disputed the message from the symposium's keynote speaker, New York Times "Personal Health" columnist Jane E. Brody. Following a Monday, Sept. 29, evening dinner, the College of Agriculture alumna delivered an emphatic speech on "The Real Breast Cancer Risks" and argued, "People are more worried about risks imposed on them from somewhere else than things they can do something about. " She listed diet, alcohol consumption, smoking and physical exercise as factors over which women have control -- and on which education efforts should focus -- then offered some advice: "If you want to fight, fight for laws that say all insurance companies should pay for mammograms for women over 40."
Recommendations from symposium work groups focused on determining cancer risk, communicating risk and developing policy options. A summary of work group reports is available from ICET at 255-8008 envtox@cornell.edu.
Among the recommendations, which represent a consensus from each work group and not necessarily the views of particular participants, were these: