ISLAMABAD: Younger women who regularly eat foods containing certain types of fat may be increasing their chances of developing breast cancer, new research suggests. This is the first study to link fatty foods with breast cancer in women who have not yet reached menopause, lead author Dr. Eunyoung Cho, from Harvard
Medical School () in Boston, told. Previous studies, which have focused mainly on postmenopausal women, have not tied fatty foods to cancer.

The current findings are based on a study of more than 90,000 premenopausal women who were followed for 8 years. When the study began in 1991 and again in 1995, the women were surveyed regarding how often they ate various fatty foods.

The results are published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. During the study period, 714 women developed breast cancer. According to Cho, "most of these women were still premenopausal at the time of diagnosis."

The total amount of fat consumed was not linked to breast cancer, but eating certain types of fat was, Cho said. Eating animal fat, which is usually found in red meat and high-fat dairy foods, increased the risk of cancer, while
eating vegetable fats did not.

Women who ate high amounts of animal fat were up to 54% more likely to develop breast cancer than women who ate the lowest amounts, the findings indicate.

Exactly how fatty foods raise the risk of breast cancer is unclear, Cho said. After being eaten, fat is thought to raise body levels of certain hormones that could promote breast cancer. Still, this doesn?t explain why eating animal fats, but not vegetable fats, made cancer more likely.

"We suspect there is some present only in animal fats that increases the risk of breast cancer," she added.

Cho noted that her team plans to follow the current group for a few more years to see if fat intake before menopause affects the risk of cancer after menopause.
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