Word: cancerously
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...women participating in the WHI - a multiyear government trial investigating a range of women's health issues, from 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...
...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 D, showed...
...protect against bone fractures. So about 15% of the women in the placebo group were allowed to continue taking their vitamin D supplements for bone health (some were taking up to 600 IUs per day), which could explain why there was little difference between the two groups in breast-cancer rates. "This is a potential problem that confounds the results of this particular trial," says Dr. Powel Brown, a professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and author of an editorial accompanying the study. "But it's not really ethical to tell postmenopausal women not to take vitamin...