Can We Prevent Breast Cancer?

October 4, 2012 at 1:18 pm , by

During one of her recent volunteer shifts at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, AnneMarie Ciccarella (right) visited a woman who was recovering from a mastectomy. “It was the same bed in the same room I woke up in six years ago to the day,” she says. “Stuff like that really gets to me: When are we going to figure this out? How can we end this?”

Breast cancer affects 1 in 8 women in their lifetime. This year, more than 220,000 American women will be diagnosed with it and 40,000 will die. When we met Ciccarella for our October issue story on breast cancer survivors, she said she’s so tired of hearing these numbers. We’ve got to find a way to stop breast cancer.

That’s where the Health of Women (HOW) study comes in, says Ciccarella, who serves as the New York volunteer team coordinator with the Love/Avon Army of Women. Launched by the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, the Army of Women has been enrolling women in different research projects since 2008. Now the foundation is launching its own study to follow a huge group of women over time to learn why the disease develops. The key to all this? Your participation.

Why It’s Important
Many breast cancer patients have no known risk factors. So, does where you work or how much you sleep affect whether you will get breast cancer? Can anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen reduce breast cancer risk? These are the types of thing we want to understand better, and the larger the group of women we study, the more we can learn, says Leslie Bernstein, Ph.D., professor and director of cancer etiology at the Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope in Los Angeles, a partner in the study.

How It Works
After you answer a questionnaire about your health history, the HOW study will send you e-mails every three to four months when a new module becomes available. The questionnaires are co-created by epidemiologists, statisticians and breast cancer advocates, and participants will have the opportunity to submit questions they want answered, says Naz Sykes, executive director of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation.

The researchers want to follow women for 20 years or more. It’s a commitment, but the modules only take a few minutes to answer. All of your data will be stored in your account and in a database available to researchers—without your name attached.

Where To Sign Up
Go to HealthofWomenStudy.org and create an account. Then get your friends involved. The researchers want healthy women from every ethnicity, plus breast cancer survivors, women with other health issues and even men who’ve had breast cancer. I’ve already enrolled and I hope you will, too. Head to the study’s helpful FAQs page for more info.

Photo by Avery Powell

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47 Responses to “Can We Prevent Breast Cancer?”

  1. I’m signing up. Microscopic price to pay for what coulf ultimately save 40,000 lives.


  2. [...] One major concern that I have heard raised about breast-cancer related fundraising is that a very small percentage of money raised has actually gone into research that would lead to better treatment or even a cure.  In fact, for advanced cancers, many of the treatments available now are the same treatments that were used ten or twenty years ago.  In this interview, breast cancer survivor and volunteer AnneMarie Ciccarella talks about the need for research advancements. [...]


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  47. The above article is truly an eye opener, Breast cancer nowadays is a major health issue for women, it is important to know how to eliminate or minimize this disease. Women who carries the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are at a higher risk of developing breast cancer and may choose to take more aggressive preventive measures. The earlier it is detected, the better chance of a cure. In most cases, the cause of breast cancer is unknown. It is therefore difficult to know what measures one should take to reduce the risks for a lifetime. However, some aspects of Western lifestyle are said to increase the overall risk for cancer. Changing some aspects of one’s life may reduce the risk of getting many kinds of cancer. It is very likely that breast cancer will be among them.





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