By Brian Carnell

Saturday, March 8, 2003

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran an excellent article looking at the surprising results of studies that have tried to find why breast cancer rates in places like Marin County are so much higher than the national average. The answer turns out to be that a large part of the difference appears to be due to relative affluence of women in such areas.

In Marin County, 198 of every 100,000 white women was diagnosed with breast cancer between 1995 and 1999. For the nation as a whole, the rate for white women is only 139 cases per 100,000. Studies of the phenomenon find that the factor that most closely correlates with the increased risk of breast cancer is that women in Marin County have a relatively wealthy, upper-middle class lifestyle.

Why would being wealthy increase the rate of breast cancer incidence? There are a number of factors that appear to be behind this phenomenon,

• Such women tend to have their first children later in life. Pregnancy and breast feeding cause cells in the breast to mature and some scientist hypothesize that the sooner this happens, the lower the risk of breast cancer.
• Wealthy women are more likely to have mammograms and other medical attention.
• Drinkning the equivalent of two glasses of wine daily raises the risk of breast cancer in some studies, and the rate of female alcohol consumption in Marin County is more than twice as high as the national average.
• Women from some white ethnic subgroups are more likely to carry genetic mutations that predispose women to breast cancer.

A study of 130,000 California teachers, for example, found that those women had a 51 percent higher rate of breast cancer than the general population.

The idea that it is increasing affluence that leads to higher breast cancer incidence is met with resistance by breast cancer activists who are convinced that the increase must be due to exposure to environmental toxins. As Jean Rizzo, director of the Breast Cancer Fund in San Francisco told the San Francisco Chronicle,

There's a blame-the-victim aspect to it: 'You had your kids late, you didn't breast feed. Bummer. Live with it.'

Apparently anything which might be psychologically discomfiting can immediately be ruled out as a possible cause of cancer.

Source:

Breast cancer amid affluence. Ulysses Torassa, San Francisco Chronicle, January 26, 2003.

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