Smoking cigarettes can prevent breast cancer in women carrying rare genes that predispose them to the disease, suggests a highly controversial new study.
An international team, co-ordinated by Steven Narod of the Women’s College hospital in Toronto, looked at the relationship between lifestyle and breast cancer in more than 300 women with inherited mutations in genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2. Only one in 250 women carries these mutations, but among those who do, 80% develop breast cancer before they reach 70.
Getting through the equivalent of 20 cigarettes a day for four years seemed to cut the risk of developing breast cancer by 53%, the team reported in the latest journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The researchers and the agencies that funded their work stress that the results apply only to women carrying these mutations.