Risk Factors For Breast Cancer: Abortion, HRT, and the Double Standard.(research methods)

With any given disease, the medical research community establishes what are risk factors and what are protective factors through the science known as epidemiology. During the past year, it was big news that the prolonged use of combination (i.e., estrogen plus progestin) hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was recognized as a risk factor for breast cancer for postmenopausal women.

This connection was given, as it were, "official" status. By official, I mean that the weight of the published scientific evidence convinced the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to acknowledge that HRT use increases a woman's future risk of developing breast cancer.

By contrast, in 2003 the same NCI pronounced that induced abortion is definitely not a risk factor for increased risk of breast cancer. Early last year the world renowned British medical journal The Lancet published an article authored by a prestigious group of Oxford researchers that came to the same conclusion.

Its lead author, Valerie Beral, undertook a publicity blitz to insist, "The totality of the worldwide epidemiological evidence indicates that pregnancies ended by induced abortion do not have adverse effects on women's subsequent risk of developing breast cancer." But as NRL News readers already know from a story in the May 2004 edition, that new study only intensified the debate.

Why? After all, can't we be sure that when science speaks, it speaks from the certainty of repeated observations conducted in an objective way?

Unfortunately, when we compare the science that concluded that prolonged use of hormone replacement therapy increases breast cancer risk and the science that concluded that an induced abortion doesn't, an objective look reveals a double standard. To document this disparity, it is important to examine the HRT/breast cancer work of a prominent Oxford University epidemiologist who just happens to be the same Valerie Beral.

Last year, Beral and her group helped establish HRT as a risk factor when they published, the "Million Woman Study" on HRT and breast cancer in the UK in The Lancet. In conducting the study, the Beral group sent questionnaires out to women between the ages of 50 and 65.