Word: breast
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...powerful idea, and there was some intriguing early evidence suggesting that something as simple as popping vitamin D might hold off the second biggest cancer killer among American women - breast cancer. So researchers were expecting to see positive results from the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), the first controlled trial of the effects of vitamin D on breast cancer...
Unfortunately, that didn't happen. Reporting in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the study authors announce that taking vitamin D supplements does not affect breast-cancer rates. After a seven-year period, women who took 400 IUs of vitamin D daily had the same rates of breast cancer as those not taking the supplements. (See TIME's A-Z Health Guide...
...disappointment," says study author Dr. Rowan Chlebowski at Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. "Basically we have an agent in vitamin D that is almost free and with little toxicity, and wouldn't it be great if it did substantially reduce the risk of breast cancer...
...hormone therapy to heart disease, cancer and fracture risk - half were given 1,000 mg of calcium and 400s IU of vitamin D daily, while the other half were not. After seven years, 528 women in the supplement group and 546 women in the control group had developed invasive breast cancer, an equivalent rate, indicating no effect from the vitamin D. Earlier observational trials had found positive links between women's taking higher amounts of supplemental vitamin D and lower breast-cancer rates, and animal studies had also suggested that the vitamin might prevent the disease. The WHI trial hints...
...daily for adults. Most people get very little vitamin D from their diet - the richest sources of the vitamin are dairy products and green leafy vegetables - so supplementation is the only way to reach recommended levels. "Four hundred IUs is just not a lot," says Dr. Larry Norton, a breast-cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. "The supplementation wasn't adequate to raise blood levels enough in susceptible individuals to have a biological impact." Indeed, the women in the study who began with the highest blood levels of vitamin D's most active breakdown product, 25-hydroxyvitamin...