October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. In WebMDs Women’s Health Magazine for the fall of 2017, there is an article that lists some of the ways to decrease the risk of developing breast cancer.

Also recently in the New York Times, there was an article on decreasing the risk of breast cancer. Both articles agree that women should drink less alcohol (no more than 14 grams a day), exercise more, and maintain a normal body weight.

And if you have the chance, breastfeed your children.

When eating you also want to avoid starchy products such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, and squash and eat more of the low fiber vegetables like peppers, broccoli, asparagus, onions, and lettuce. And cartanoid-rich foods such as carrots, spinach, apricots, collards, and mangos are important.

Also be sure to get plenty of calcium

But neither of these two articles mentioned the very significant danger posed by the intake of estrogen, which estrogen increases the development of breast tissue. And the more breast tissue you have, the greater the chance for developing breast cancer.

Additional breast tissue also creates problems for mammography because the more dense tissue requires more radiation exposure to create an adequate image.

There is also the additional risk of synergism between the estrogen and the radiation in production and development cancer. This synergism is documented in the article that I coauthored  in Cancer Research, which showed that exposure to both estrogen hormones and radiation markedly shortened the time to develop breast cancer and double the incidence of breast cancer.

So if you take hormones, use other means of breast imaging, such as breast thermogram or MRIs that has been developed for breast evaluation.

Another technology that is being developed is called MRI spectroscopy. It can differentiate between benign or malignant cells and is being explored for both breast and prostate cancer.

In the not-too-distant future, we will be able to make a diagnosis of cancer without having to perform a biopsy and spread the cancer cells.