Hodgkin’s patients ‘risk breast cancer’

Younger women treated for Hodgkin’s disease with chest radiation face a higher risk of developing breast cancer, though a type of chemotherapy reduces that risk, researchers say.

The finding, based on data collected from women treated for Hodgkin’s before the mid-1990s, supports current thinking that lower doses of radiation in combination with chemotherapy provide a safer cure for many cancers.A second cancer is the leading cause of death among long-term survivors of Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes, the study said.Breast cancer is a particular risk for women who survived Hodgkin’s.Women diagnosed with Hodgkin’s at age 30 or younger who underwent chest radiation faced as much as an eight-fold risk of breast cancer later on, depending on the strength of radiation used, wrote Lois Travis of the US National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.Of 3,817 women with Hodgkin’s included in the study, 105, or nearly 3 per cent, eventually developed breast cancer.But women who had undergone only chemotherapy treatment with an alkylating agent, a drug that inhibits cell division, had a 40 per cent lower risk of breast cancer.A combination of radiation and chemotherapy still had a 1.4-fold higher risk, though the risk declined the more the drug was used.Radiation causes mutations in breast cells which, after prolonged stimulation from a woman’s hormones, can eventually develop into cancer, Travis wrote.(Source: ABC, 23 July 2003)