Breast Cancer and brith control pills. Please read, Women and Men!

I see no reason not to help get this article out as Breast Cancer has more than likely touched or taken someone you loved or knew. Be it a spouse, relative, really good friend or friend of a friend, Breast Cancer is an insidious cancer. Oral contraceptives have long been linked to increasing the chances for women to get Breast Cancer. I have lost people I loved and cherised to this disease. I hope you will read this and pass it along, if you would be so kind. Just might save someone's daughter, wife, grandmother or friend.
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The Pill and Breast Cancer

Tim Collins, MD

American Thinker

Bad news for women who have been using birth control pills, although you won't learn about it from the mainstream media. An International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Monographs Working Group has concluded that combined estrogen-progestogen oral contraceptives and combined estrogen-progestogen menopausal therapy are carcinogenic to humans, after a thorough review of the published scientific evidence[i].

IARC is an arm of the World Health Organization with, as they say, "global reach." Involved in everything from basic research to publication of classification systems for various cancer types, the IARC classifications are the standard of care in the U.S. and elsewhere. IARC statements are accorded great authority. One can imagine that if, in the epigraph, the words "oral contraceptives" were replaced with, say, "peanut butter" or "Republican Party membership," the political posturing and shouting in the media would never stop.

But we're talking birth control pills, so the silence is deafening.

Lists of risks associated with BCPs can be found in any medical textbook: heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, and pulmonary emboli. Less lethal but still obnoxious side-effects include depression, headaches, and nausea. Liver cancer is associated with BCP use. Liver cancer is not terribly common, but neither is it rare; the National Cancer Institute estimates that it killed about 5,500 women in 2007[ii]. For comparison, cervical cancer, whose risk is also increased by BCP use, will have claimed the lives of an estimated 3,600 women in the same year. But it is breast cancer that concerns us here. Breast cancer is the second-most common form of malignancy diagnosed in U.S. women (after skin cancer), with NCI estimates of 178,000 new diagnoses and 40,000 deaths. If the amount of money poured into screening programs is any indication, breast cancer is by far the most feared, and most politically volatile, of any malignancy.

Papers have been published for decades suggesting an increased risk of breast cancer in birth control pill users. In 1996, a meta-analysis of the 54 studies in the literature, dating back to 1959, was published in Lancet. There were three principal findings: first, that current or recent users of BCPs had a "slightly increased risk of future breast cancer; second, that the cancers tended to be lower stage (hadn't spread when diagnosed); and finally, that ten years after cessation of use, risk dropped to baseline[iii]. The National Cancer Institute cites this study on its website, as well as two others. The second study is the 2002 "Woman's CARE" study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which the authors concluded that BCPs conferred no increased risk, period[iv]. Finally, the NCI cites its own 2003 study, concluding that BCP use does increase risk, and the risk is highest in young women who have used the Pill within five years of the cancer diagnosis[v]. The reason for this last finding appears to be that breasts of young women, especially adolescents, are anatomically and physiologically more vulnerable to carcinogens like BCPs because they have not gone through a nine-month pregnancy. Interestingly, the NCI website does not mention the 2005 IARC/WHO statement cited at the header of this paper.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue. There is evidence that birth control pills, especially when used by young women, increase a woman's risk of breast cancer[ix]. Given that we're talking about the most widely used class of drugs on the planet, and one of the commonest forms of malignancy in women, the implications are not trivial. But the spin of the medical establishment, as well as cancer charities including the National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society, and Susan Komen Foundation, is to push these findings under the rug. PLEASE continue reading

Hat tip: American Thinker