Thursday, February 3, 2011

The Estrogen Controversy

Estrogen is a hormone that is essential for the normal growth and development of the breasts and organs significant for childbearing. It assists control a woman's menstrual cycles and is necessary for reproduction. Estrogen assists maintain the heart and healthy bones as well.
No one understands what causes breast cancer, and no one could obviously state why we are observing an increase in breast cancer cases. More women grow breast cancer than men - approximately 100 cases in females for every one in a man. Women's bodies make more estrogen than men's. Hence, the conventional wisdom has been that estrogen causes breast cancer.
What we don't comprehend, but researchers are studying, is how estrogen runs in the breast tissue. We currently understand that estrogen is most likely secreted or produced directly from breast tissue - a number of from the fat of the breast, some from the ducts themselves. How and why this production persists all through life is unidentified. We at the present comprehend as well that the body has many self-regulating or balancing mechanisms - that one hormone is typically balanced by another.
Estrogen might be implicated in breast cancer risk due to:
1) its role in stimulating breast cell division;
2) its work as long as the critical periods of breast development and growth;
3) its outcome on other hormones that rouse breast cell division, and
4) its support of the development of estrogen-responsive tumors.
Estrogen is powerfully related with the early growth of a lot of breast cancers, but few studies have looked at the connection between high estrogen levels and cancer recurrence, particularly in women who are taking anti-estrogen drugs such as tamoxifen.
Estrogen therapy is regarding the last thing you'd wait for a doctor to set down for a woman with breast cancer: The hormone is well-known for coaxing tumors to develop, not get smaller. But in a latest study, one out of three postmenopausal women with advanced cancer who were set a daily dose of estrogen saw their tumors slow to a stop, and in a number of cases, even shrink.
However, a woman's risk for breast cancer is linked with lifetime exposure to estrogen. knowing how estrogen runs in the body, understanding in relation to how chemicals in the environment could have an effect on body estrogen levels, and how diet and lifestyle factors influence estrogen exposure over a lifetime, might assist women make more informed decisions concerning their bodies and their environment.

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