According to startling and troubling research presented in an abstract at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago, radiation therapy received by young girls for childhood cancers such as Hodgkin's lymphoma is a major cause of breast cancer later in life.
Chaya Moskowitz, a biostatistician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and study leader told the meeting that by age 50, as much as 24 percent of women who had been treated with radiotherapy for childhood cancer had in fact developed breast cancer.
The figure excluded Hodgkin's lymphoma. By age 50, as much as 30 percent of women who had been treated with radiotherapy for Hodgkin's when girls had in fact developed breast cancer.
While the association has been known for some time, the surprising finding is that even lower doses of radiation were acting as serious risks for breast cancer. Surprising and troubling, since kids in the 70s and 80s got higher doses than they do today, and they got them to much bigger areas of the body, yet not even lowered doses or smaller, involved fields
Source: AP
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