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Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Breast cancer and left-handedness
Left-handed women are more than twice as likely as right-handers to suffer from breast cancer before reaching menopause, Dutch scientists said.
Researchers at the University Medical Center in Utrecht in the Netherlands speculate that there is a shared origin early in life for both left-handedness and developing breast cancer, possibly exposure to hormones in the womb.
Reuters reported that Cuno Uiterwaal, an assistant professor of clinical epidemiology at the university, and his colleagues studied 12,000 healthy, middle-aged women born between 1932-1941 who were part of a breast screening program. The scientists determined their hand preference and followed up their medical history to see which women developed breast cancer.
If we take pre-menopausal and post-menopausal breast cancer then there was a 40 percent increased risk. But when spilled further, the scientists found most of the excess risk was in breast cancer before the menopause. They found left-handed women are more than twice as likely to develop pre-menopausal breast cancer as non-left handed women.
(September 28, 2005 issue)
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