How Women Can Significantly Reduce One Major Risk Factor For Breast Cancer

Here’s some good news for women fighting breast cancer and for women who are at a higher risk for getting it. You may know that 80% of breast cancers are estrogen positive cancers. This doesn’t mean that estrogen caused the cancer. But it does mean that estrogen stimulates the growth of the cancer. That’s why oncologists prescribe anti-estrogen drugs for estrogen-positive breast cancer. But here’s something you may not have heard about.

Pre-clinical data indicate that the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil supplements improve the effect of these anti-estrogen drugs. But what about women who do not have cancer, but are at a higher risk for it? Would they be able to decrease their risk by taking fish oil supplements? The answer will surprise you.

Just last month, researchers reported on a two year experiment to answer this question. To do the experiment, they looked at 266 healthy postmenopausal women with high density breast readings (=25%) on a mammogram. Women with high-density breasts are four to six times more likely to get breast cancer. Of these women, 50% were at a healthy weight, 20% were obese as defined by having a BMI (body mass index) over 29, and the rest (30%) were in between.

They divided the women into five groups.

One group did not receive any treatment. They gave two other groups the same anti-estrogen drug in two different doses. They gave the fourth group 4 grams of a high-quality fish oil. And they gave the fifth group a combination of fish oil and the drug. During the experiment, they checked the levels of the two primary components of fish oil: EPA and DHA. The idea was to see if in two years, any of the treatments would be able to decrease breast density and thus lower the risk of cancer. Here’s what happened.

Only one group of women showed any benefit at all. The decrease only happened in the women who were taking the fish oil. And specifically, the higher the DHA levels were, the more effective the fish oil was at decreasing the density readings. In the words of one of the authors of the study, Dr. Andrea Manni, “The finding supports the idea that omega-3s, and specifically DHA, are preferentially protective…”

So if you are a woman with dense breasts, or if you are a woman fighting estrogen-positive breast cancer, be sure to start taking fish oil supplements.

Yours for better health,

Dr. Jack Beitz, DC

PS All fish oil supplements are not created equal. Always make sure you are getting your supplements from a trustworthy source