'Breast cancer cases to go up by 3% per year'

Tue, Apr 15 12:55 AM

Urban women face a greater risk of developing breast cancer and one out of 8-10 women in Delhi and the NCR likely to get the disease in their lifetime. Also younger women in India are likely to be more prone to the disease than their counterparts in the west.

In India, women in the age group of 43-46 years get breast cancer, while in the West, those between 53 and 57 years are vulnerable, said Sidharth Sahni, general secretary of the Indian Breast Cancer Initiative. Talking to the Hindustan Times, Sahni, consultant of Surgical Oncology at Artemis Health Institute, said the shocking figures come from the National Cancer Registry and also from a 2005 study by the International Association of Cancer Research in Lyon, France.

"Interestingly, women in villages face far less risk of developing breast cancer. Only one in 36 to 40 women are likely to develop breast cancer in rural areas.

" The Lyon study calculated the figures based on demographic patterns in India and predicted a conservative increase in the incidence of breast cancer at the rate of three per cent per year compounded annually, he said. This study predicts that the number of new cases in India by the year 2015 will rise to 2 -2.5 lakh per year.

The Indian Breast Cancer Initiative - taken up by AIIMS, Artemis, Apollo, Tata Memorial Hospital, Regional Cancer Centre, Trivandrum, and Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences, Hyderabad - aims at providing a platform for increasing breast cancer awareness among medical practitioners as well as the general public, he said. "The pesticide DDT is major cause of breast cancer.

A direct relationship of DDT with breast cancer was proved in a study published in 1991 by the Cornel University. The only other cancer with a direct causal relationship is smoking and lung cancer," he said.

The other contributory factors are fried and fatty foods, processed foods and unhealthy lifestyles, which lower the innate cancer-fighting mechanisms of the body and increase the saturated body fat content. This leads to the production of excess of hormone oestrogen, causing breast cancer, he said.

"Breast cancer is the single largest kind of cancer cases among women in Delhi, Bangalore, Calcutta, Mumbai and Chandigarh, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research National Cancer Registry figures," he said.

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