breast milk linked to cancer [again]

[pofacedandproud]

Here

The research concludes that women should continue to breastfeed as many other benefits for baby. So women should breastfeed, but feel bad and worry they are doing something that may make their child ill in the long term? What are we supposed to do with this kind of research, the chemicals we have in our bodies we have been absorbing since childhood. Any thoughts? I feel crap.

that was the yahoo headline Vulpus 'breastmilk link to cancer'

As an aside, I sent the article reference to Goldacre, and I thought you might like to see his autoreply, to cheer you up:

"ben is experiencing spectacular email backlog, on the edge of
declaring email bankruptcy, but that probably won't stop him getting
back to you. if it's about giving a talk, the answer's probably no
these days as i've got a day job, and 8,734 other mischievous projects
on the go, so unless it's free admission and open to all comers, and
even then, sorry, probably no. if you've sent a story, thanks! if it's
about anything else, in particular if i owe you something and the
deadline is passing, i definitely know, and am glad of the prod."

yeah thanks Ben.

Shona is right and the article does say that - apart from the headline and the last line "women should continue BFing".

Unfortunately the headline and the last bit are usually the bits people remember and they are misleading. It is about chemicals present during pregnancy and their effect.

Ahem. I think you mean Shona and Vulpus are right.

God, I'm an academic. Don't expect me to go quietly when someone else says what I said two minutes before

Reporting where all baby feeding is concerned is spectacularly bad. I remember when ds was 4m and formula fed, the headlines were "Formula fed babies in heart death risk" and some supposedly kosher double-blind randomised trial had reported this. I got dh to get me a copy of the research and there was a line in the paper saying "This research should in no way be taken as advice on whether or not babies should be breastfed; we have looked only at a small cohort of premature babies...etc etc..." and still it was lauded as the gold standard, absolute proof.

Not that I think babies shouldn't be breastfed, I DO, for all sorts of reasons, I am just saying reporting is really poor.

It's a perfectly reasonable thing to investigate - why Danish men get more testicular ca. than Finnish men.

If it is pollution related then the babies are exposed in utero.

It has nothing to do with bf - testing breastmilk is an easy way to find out what pollutants have passed to the baby in pregnancy....already passed, whether the baby is later ff or bf.

It is beyond belief crass and idiotic to say there is a link between bf and testicular cancer.

The headline should be 'pollution link with testicular cancer'.

It makes no sense to link it with breastfeeding, as breastmilk is merely the testing substance for the (hypothetical) link.

I'm trying to think of an analogy here - what other condition might you test for, and then blame the testing mechanism for 'causing' the illness?

I can think of one, tiktok - the pill has been blamed for causing cervical cancer (I seem to remember) - but barrier methods of contraception are known to help prevent cervical cancer & if a woman is taking the pill, she's unlikely to be using a barrier method as well. Statistics can prove anything you want them to.

at my own lack of courtesy.

I also hear the poster known as vulpusina is as beautiful as she is intelligent. And that she is singularly free of dioxins, making her intellect even more refined than other mere mortals.

They have used breast milk because many of these compounds are fat soluble.

They wouldn't be as easy to detect in other samples eg urine. Other methods to test fat soluble toxins would be invasive and unlikely to get through ethics or recruit subjects.

The science itself seems sound but the numbers are small.

I get really annoyed that journalists with no science training feel they have the skills to interpret studies such as this.

I don't get to read the papers these days. Too busy MNing breast feeding. Was it bad?

Could the compounds not be found in blood? If the research is actually concerned with in utero exposure, then I would have thought that blood samples would be the best way to assess (or are they too difficult to collect? I know I hate giving blood!)

I seem to remember that a lot of these nasty chemicals are fat soluble so hang around in the body fat rather than the blood so that's why it's hard to measure how much exposure we have had?

Or something.

Oh god why do I keep repeating other people on thsi thread.

Ignore me and I'll go away eventually.

Havent had time to read the article but even if it was true, surely all the other proven benefits of breastfeeding would outweight this risk?