- LONDON (Reuters Health) -
The traditional English breakfast may help explain British women's higher
rate of a type of cancer, researchers have found.
-
- In their study, women who regularly ate an old-fashioned
"cooked" breakfast or drank lots of piping-hot tea were shown
to have an increased risk of oesophageal cancer.
-
- Surprisingly, alcohol consumption was not linked to a
higher risk. And skipping breakfast altogether was actually worse than
downing a greasy morning meal in terms of cancer risk.
-
- Dr. Linda Sharp, from the University of Aberdeen,
Scotland,
and colleagues compared the diets and lifestyle patterns of 159 women with
squamous cell carcinoma of the oesophagus with those of a group of healthy
women. Squamous cell carcinoma is the most common form of oesophageal
cancer
in the UK. And rates of this type of cancer are about three times higher
among UK women compared with most other European populations.
-
- "Studies into oesophageal cancer have often
concentrated
on men, where the major risk factors are smoking and drinking," Sharp
explained in a statement. "But women have, at least in part, tended
to smoke and drink less heavily than men, and we wanted to know if other
lifestyle factors influenced women's risk."
-
- And they indeed found that women who normally ate a
traditional
breakfast were twice as likely to develop the cancer as women who ate a
light breakfast--defined as anything other than a "fry up." These
lighter breakfasts, as well as consumption of fruit and salads, appeared
to have a protective effective, according to the report in the British
Journal of Cancer.
-
- However, women who regularly skipped breakfast had the
highest risk of oesophageal cancer. The authors speculate that one
explanation
could be the ability of food to ease morning gastric reflux. When this
backup of stomach acids is chronic, it can cause a condition called
Barrett's
esophagus, a risk factor for oesophageal cancer.
-
- As for tea, drinking the beverage in and of itself was
not a significant risk factor in this study. However, women who preferred
their tea steaming hot were at greater cancer risk.
-
- "Scalding hot drinks may burn the inside of the
foodpipe, causing damage which in time could increase the risk of
cancer,"
Sharp suggested.
-
- In other findings, the longer a woman smoked, the greater
her risk of oesophageal cancer. Drinking was not a clear risk factor, but
the researchers note that the women tended to be light drinkers.
-
- In a statement, Dr. Gordon McVie, director general of
Britain's Cancer Research Campaign, said, "By eating a healthy breakfast, leaving hot drinks for a while to cool before drinking, and of cou
rse resisting
the temptation to smoke, women can substantially reduce their chances of
developing oesophageal cancer."
-
- SOURCE: British Journal of
Cancer 2001.
|
