Category: Women’s health

Screening participation and general health: another cautionary tale

Mette Lise Lousdal and Henrik Støvring

While organised mammography screening programs were being gradually introduced across various countries, researchers could study the impact of screening on breast cancer mortality by comparing mortality in areas with and without screening. Now that screening has been fully implemented in most Western countries, researchers can only compare women who participate in screening with those who do not participate.

Women who do not participate in screening may seem to be a good choice as a comparison group, as they are not affected by screening. But the question is: can non-participants reflect how breast cancer mortality would have developed in women in general without the introduction of screening?

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Is it time to establish breast cancer as a smoking-related cancer?

Inger T Gram

Smoking was established as a cause of lung cancer in the late 1950s. It then took another 50 years to establish that colorectal cancer was also a smoking-related cancer. However, as of 2018, a causal relationship between smoking and breast cancer had not yet been established. It may seem strange that it is taking so long to prove that smoking is a cause of all three of the most common cancers globally. Breast and lung cancer each account for 2.09 million cases annually and colorectal cancer for 1.8 million.

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It only takes a minute, girl: women who run for just 1 minute per day have better bone health

Vicky Stiles, Brad Metcalf, Karen Knapp and Alex Rowlands

Victoria_StilesBrad_MetcalfKaren_KnappAlex_Rowlands

We don’t yet know whether it’s best to do it all at once, or little and often, but what we do know is that if a woman’s day-to-day activity contains 1–2 minutes of weight-bearing, high-intensity activity, similar to a medium-paced run for pre-menopausal women or a slow jog for post-menopausal women, she will have better bone health than women who do less. The benefits of high-impact activity on bone health are nothing new. What is novel about our findings is that better bone health is linked to such a short amount of daily activity, albeit at an intensity of the running variety.

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