Sandy Hutchens Cancer Prevention

While we know that there is no balm for the sense of helplessness that arises from learning a loved one has cancer, a national research study is focused on giving average Canadians occasion to aid in someone’s future grief. Personal health data from 300,000 Canadians over the next 30 years will give researchers a better understanding of risk factors for cancer.

“We know a bit about some of the causes of cancer, but we clearly don’t know all of them,” said Dr. Marilyn Borugian, scientist at the B.C. Cancer Agency. “People still walk into doctor’s offices everyday who don’t have the common risk factors and their illness can’t be explained.”

Borugian is the director of the province’s portion of the study, called the BC Generations Project.The project just launched its drive to enlist 40,000 B.C. residents between the ages of 40 and 69. Participants will complete a questionnaire about health and lifestyle, have various physical measurements taken, and provide blood and urine samples. “The purpose is to try and get at solutions around cancer prevention and early detection,” Borugian said.

The anonymous data will be tracked over 30 years and then compared against the provincial cancer registry. Information from those who develop cancer, diabetes and heart disease will be placed side by side with those who remain healthy. The result will hopefully be a clear reading on what was at play before the person got sick, potentially pointing to contributing factors or causes, Borugian said.

“If I take a blood sample from someone who’s already become ill, then (I’ve) confused the picture with things that might be the result of the stresses or weight loss or medications as a result of the illness,” she said.

Chris Dawkins, of Vancouver, gave his blood during the 90-minute process with two loved ones in mind: his father, who died of cancer, and his sister-in-law, a breast cancer survivor who persuaded him to join the study.

“I’m wishing something like this had happened years ago, so that we had that body of knowledge and those trends and that information that we could have relied on before now,” said the 64-year-old. “My father died in 1961 and there’s been a lot of (other) pain and heartbreak since then, and I was thinking that if a project like this had gotten off the ground several years ago, we would have been so much ahead of the game.”

Along with B.C., Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada are participating in the cohort study, which is supported by $42 million from Canadian Partnership Against Cancer and regional funding.

While an assessment clinic is currently open in the city of Vancouver, another one will open in the following year in Victoria. A mobile assessment van will also tour small communities in the province. One advantage of the study is that the data collected is about how participants are living at present, as opposed to asking afflicted people to recall their habits from years past, Borougian said.

Sandy Hutchens Cancer Prevention – Researchers from McGill University in Montreal surveyed nearly 3,600 Canadian men aged 35 to 70 and found those who averaged at least a drink a day had higher risks of a number of cancers than men who drank occasionally or not at all.

These included cancers of the esophagus, stomach, colon, lungs, pancreas, liver and prostate.

When the researchers looked at individual types of alcohol, though, only beer and “spirits” — and not wine — were linked to elevated cancer risks.

In general, the odds increased in tandem with the men’s lifetime alcohol intake, according to findings published in the Cancer Prevention and Detection. With several cancers, men who drank at least once a day tended to have higher risks than those who drank on a regular, but less-than-daily, basis.

When it came to esophageal cancer, for instance, men who had a drink one to six times per week had an 83 per cent higher risk than teetotalers and less-frequent drinkers, while daily drinkers had a three-fold higher risk.

In addition, when the researchers looked only at daily drinkers, the risks generally increased with the number of years the men had been drinking daily.

“Our results show that the heaviest consumers over the lifetime had the biggest increases in the risks of multiple sites of cancer,” researcher Dr. Andrea Benedetti told Reuters.

Many studies have suggested that moderate drinking — usually defined as no more than a drink or two per day — can be a healthy habit, particularly when it comes to heart disease risk.

But the current study suggested that even such moderate drinking levels are linked to higher risks of certain cancers, at least when the alcohol of choice is beer or liquor.

The question of whether moderate drinkers should cut down, however, cannot be answered by a single study.

The Science Behind Beer and Health
October 2006 (Medialink) – Who knew that beer may help reduce the risk of heart disease and certain other chronic diseases related to aging? According to a professor of medicine and public health at the Boston University School of Medicine, it may. Dr. Curtis Ellison spoke at a conference on a panel called, “Beer: To Your Health!,” held by the Center for Food, Nutrition and Agriculture Policy at the University of Maryland-College Park. This conference reviewed the science on health benefits of moderate beer and alcohol consumption and the challenges of communicating a balanced message to the public.

Brewed from barley, malt and other grains, some studies suggest that beer may have heart-healthy benefits and that older adults who consume moderate amounts of alcohol may have a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, osteoporosis – and maybe even obesity.

The key is moderation. U.S. dietary guidelines define “moderation” as one drink per day for women, and two for men. Experts say that for those who choose to drink, alcohol should be consumed with food – and that the total number of alcoholic drinks should not be averaged out for the week. That means people should not save their ‘drink a day’ all week and then have seven drinks on Saturday night.