Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston say exercise helps combat breast cancer. Not the first time we've heard this fact. But these same researchers have something new to say -- about the reason physical activity lowers the risk of breast cancer recurrence.

Jennifer Ligibel, MD, of Dana-Farber, reports that exercise lowers levels of the hormone insulin in the bloodstream. This is significant because there appears to be an association between relatively high levels of insulin, seen in obese and sedentary people, and an increased risk of breast cancer recurrence and breast cancer-related death.

"We know that women who are overweight at the time of breast cancer diagnosis have a higher risk of recurrence than lean women, but the reasons for this have not been clear," said Ligibel.

How much do you know about recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, or rBGH for short? Probably not as much as you should. The genetically-engineered hormone, which is widely used in dairy cows and manufactured by the infamous agricultural giant Monsanto, has been linked to a whole slew of problems, both in cows and humans, including cancer.

And though both Monsanto and the FDA have stood behind rBGH, there's a huge movement out there to get it banned from regular milk. In the meantime, though, the best defense is buying organic. And to do your research.

Femara (letrozole) provides both anticancer responses and disease stabilization in a significant number of patients with recurrent, estrogen receptor positive ovarian cancer. The results of the study were published in Clinical Cancer Research.

Femara blocks levels of estrogen in the body, ultimately reducing or preventing growth of estrogen positive cancer cells. Femara has been demonstrated to be effective for estrogen positive breast cancer, but has not yet had a clear influence in women with ovarian cancer.

Forty two patients were part of a clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness of Femara. At three months, 42 percent of patients achieved disease stabilization and 9 percent achieved a regression of their disease. At over six months, 26 percent of patients still did not have progression of their disease measured by CA125 levels in the blood.

The researchers concluded that Femara may provide an effective and well tolerated treatment alternative for patients with recurrent, estrogen positive ovarian cancer.

I have heard many times that being obese or overweight increases the risk of developing breast cancer. It also has been said that it shortens the time between the return of the disease.

Why is this? It might be because of a hormone in our bodies called leptin.

Researchers are doing experiments on mice that might prove to be an important influence in developing drugs that target the mechanism that causes obese individuals to have a higher risk of the disease.

Italian researchers speaking at the Experimental Biology 2007 in Washington, DC, report evidence on how leptin, a hormone found in fat cells, significantly influences breast cancer development and progression in mice.

Leptin sends messages to the body that no more food is needed, a process that might not work well for those that are overweight or obese. Leptin also is involved with cell differentiation and proliferation in the body. Leptin has demonstrated to play a significant role in promoting breast cancer in obese women by increasing the amount of estrogen in the breast tissue.

Even though these are experiments done only on mice at this point, this learning process is what leads to new drugs and targeted therapies.

Back in the news: the link between hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and breast cancer. This time, the connection is seemingly more conclusive than before, when some argued that many factors influence the risk of breast cancer, that HRT could not do the job all on its own.

Now, two separate studies offer up powerful evidence that HRT is linked to tumor growth. Case in point: when use of the therapy drops, so do incidences of breast cancer.

New figures in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest there have been 16,000 fewer cases of breast cancer nationwide since mid-2002, when women stopped taking their hormone pills following the federal Women's Health Initiative announcement connecting the therapy with increased risk of breast cancer, stroke, and heart attack.

Many did not want to believe HRT was to blame for so many breast cancer diagnoses. And maybe it's not the actual cause of the disease, but the fuel for tumors trying to grow.

These new findings do not appear to be a statistical fluke, says one doctor. Numbers have been computed and re-computed, and the message is clear: HRT is strongly implicated as the guilty party. There is just no other culprit, says a statistician at the National Cancer Institute.

Wyeth, maker of Premarin and Prempro -- two forms of hormone therapy -- continues to caution women against drawing any conclusions about HRT and breast cancer. There still may be broader explanation for the decline in cases, say their spokespeople.

Way to go Wake Forest University scientists -- for adding to the body of evidence connecting stress to illness and for reporting before anyone else that the stress hormone epinephrine causes changes in prostate and breast cancer cells that may make them resistant to death.

Emotional stress contributes not only to the development of cancer, says lead researcher George Kulik, D.V.M., Ph.D, but it also reduces the effectiveness of cancer treatments.

Previous research shows levels of epinephrine, produced by the adrenal glands, are sharply increased during stressful situations and can stay elevated during long-term stress and depression.

During this study, published in the on-line Journal of Biological Chemistry, Kulik and colleagues found that a protein called BAD -- the cause of cell death -- becomes inactive when cancer cells are exposed to epinephrine.

This is huge for patients and researchers.

"It may be important for patients who have increased responses to stress to learn to manage the effects," said Kulik. "And, the results point to the possibility of developing an intervention to block the effects of epinephrine."

A new study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute suggests that postmenopausal women who eat healthy amounts of plant food rich in estrogen-like compounds called lignans may reduce their risk of developing breast cancer.

Lignans are found only in certain foods. Lignans only come from plant foods, such as whole grains, nuts, seeds, and beans. The best source of lignans are flax seeds.

The study, including over fifty eight thousand French women, showed that they had a 17 percent lower risk of developing breast cancer if lignans were part of their diet compared with women having the lowest dietary lignan levels.

A diet containing lots of plant food is hypothesized to offer a breast cancer prevention strategy, however, if you have already been diagnosed with estrogen receptor positive breast cancer it is best to talk to your doctor before going on any high lignan diet. The jury is still out on whether it can help with lowering the risk of recurrence and if it is safe for ER positive breast cancers.

Lung cancer tumors in mice are shrinking -- with the help of a hormone important in the control of blood pressure.

This new discovery, led by scientists at Wake University School of Medicine, suggests some drugs used to manage blood pressure might also prevent or treat lung cancer.

This all came about when it was noticed that lung cancer rates were lower among those treated for high blood pressure with angiotensin-converting enzyme, or ACE, inhibitors. These drugs, including Capoten and Lotensin, increase levels of angiotensin-(1-7) in the bloodstream.

In studies, the angiotensin-(1-7) hormone caused a 30 percent decrease in tumor volume in mice. Tumors in mice not treated with the hormone more than doubled.

This study, published in the journal Cancer Research, is the first demonstration of the effect in animals.

Findings from an international study suggest that women with a waist size of more than 34 inches are more likely to develop cancer of the womb than women who boast slimmer waistlines.

The study, funded in part by the British charity Cancer Research UK, sized up 223,000 women worldwide and determined that women with a waistline less than 31 inches have half the risk of developing womb cancer than their heavier counterparts.

There has been a significant rise in cases of womb cancer in Britain. And the link between the disease and weight gain is most prevalent among postmenopausal women who have never used hormone replacement therapy or the birth control pill.

According to the National Sizing Survey conducted in 2004, the average British woman now has a 34-inch waist. This is more than six inches bigger than the average size of a woman in the 1950s, says Dr. Lesley Walker of Cancer Research UK.

"Women are larger than they were when they existed on a wartime diet and were generally more active and this is having serious consequences," Walker says.

More than 6,000 women in the UK are diagnosed with womb cancer each year. The disease kills about 1,000 annually.

Breast cancer drug tamoxifen, designed to cut recurrence in women with estrogen-receptor positive disease, has been shown to continue working long after women stop taking the drug. And two studies suggest it might also offer long-term protection for healthy women with high risk of developing breast cancer.

One such study found the drug decreases risk of hormone-sensitive breast cancer by 39 percent over 20 years. Another shows a 34 percent decrease for up to eight years after the therapy concludes.

Published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, one study -- the International Breast Cancer Intervention Study, or IBIS -- looked at 7,145 women at high risk of breast cancer. And for the first time, clear evidence has surfaced in support of the merits of tamoxifen after the completion of treatment.

IBIS study participants took either a daily dose of tamoxifen or a placebo for five years. At the eight-year mark, 87 women who took the actual drug were diagnosed with estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer. And 129 women in the placebo group were diagnosed with the same disease.

In the second study, researchers from the Royal Marsden Hospital in London investigated 20-year data on 2,471 healthy women at high risk of breast cancer who took tamoxifen for six or seven years. Similar results were found.

Despite the benefits of tamoxifen as a preventative treatment, the drug is not currently approved for this use in the UK, where breast cancer is the most common form of female cancer.

Wyeth officials say their hormone replacement therapy Prempro is not the cause of one Ohio woman's breast cancer. But two jury decisions prove otherwise.

The first jury, in October, awarded Jennie Nelson and her husband $1.5 million in compensatory damages, validating Nelson's claim that her breast cancer -- resulting in a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation -- was caused by the Prempro she took for six years. When this verdict was thrown out due to a mistrial, a retrial began.

The retrial concluded yesterday -- with a Philadelphia jury awarding the Nelsons this time with $3 million.

"Both times this case has been heard on terms established by Wyeth and still the juries have clearly found that Prempro causes breast cancer," says Nelson's attorney Tobias Millrood, adding that Wyeth puts sales ahead of patient safety.

Wyeth respectfully disagrees and argues that it acted responsibly in the promotion of its hormone replacement products and in disclosing with doctors and patients all therapy-associated health risks.

Millions of women have used Wyeth's hormone replacement therapies to control the effects of menopause, and the company, sanctioned in January to pay $1 million to an Arkansas breast cancer survivor, now faces more than 5,000 lawsuits of this same nature.

Despite a large-scale study revealing drugs like Prempro increase the risk of breast cancer if used for five years or more, the drug still remains on the market. And Wyeth is so sure their drug is not at fault for causing Nelson's breast cancer that they plan to appeal yesterday's verdict.

They are called DES daughters, and they are the women who mothers took the anti-miscarriage hormone drug DES during pregnancy. It is estimated that millions of pregnant women were given this drug between the 1940s and 1960s, and it's now been determined that the daughters born to these women have not only an increased risk of a rare vaginal cancer but also nearly double the chance of developing breast cancer.

This sad finding has been addressed before but now more than ever, DES daughters are urged to stick to a strict breast cancer screening schedule.

A news brief published in the February 2007 issue of Good Housekeeping boldly reminds all women to comply with government guidelines that call for mammograms for all women every one to two years starting at age 40 and every year after the age of 50. But it's a different story for women exposed in utero to DES.

"If you were exposed to DES, be sure to let your doctor know and have a mammogram ever year, even in your 40s," says Julie Palmer, lead researcher of the DES study.

An Arkansas woman claiming the hormone replacement drug Prempro caused her breast cancer just won her legal battle against Wyeth, the maker of the drug.

Mary Daniel was awarded $1 million in compensatory damages thanks to a Philadelphia jury decision stating Wyeth acted with malice or reckless disregard for selling Prempro -- the drug Daniels took for 16 months to relieve hot flashes. The next step for Daniels, whose husband will receive $500,000, is a hearing to consider punitive damages.

Wyeth's lawyer argues that Prempro -- a combination of estrogen and progestin -- is still prescribed to women and suggests Daniel's breast cancer was caused by other risk factors, such as family history of the disease.

It's an unsettling journey -- the pursuit of the five-year cancer survival mark. Some say each year of cancer survival makes the future more of a sure thing. And so surviving five years -- the traditional landmark of real remission -- is a big accomplishment. But then there's the perspective of numbers that for me say I have a 93 percent chance of surviving breast cancer for five years. After that, though, there's no telling what will happen. So I am eagerly awaiting the moment when I cross the five-year finish line as I anxiously realize this very same moment may also signal a more dismal outlook.

The paradox hit me straight in the face yesterday as I was waiting for my radiation oncologist to give me another six-month all clear announcement. I was reading the January/February 2007 issue of Coping magazine while I waited. And as I flipped through the pages, I landed right at these words:

Studies show that half of all breast cancer recurrences occur after completion of five years of standard tamoxifen therapy. Additionally, a third of women with estrogen receptor-positive early breast cancer experience a recurrence, and more of half of these recurrences occur more than five years after surgery.

Now this doesn't apply directly to me. My breast cancer was estrogen receptor-negative which makes me a non-candidate for tamoxifen. And this is what scares me. My tumor was aggressive and while my treatment was also aggressive, I don't get the extra five-year protection from hormone therapy. If women taking this drug can have recurrences after completing the therapy, I wonder what's in store for me having not had it.

Maybe I'm making comparisons that don't amount to any real conclusions. Perhaps my type of disease allows for a more secure future. Or perhaps it places me on shaky ground. I don't know for sure. And I don't think I'll dive any deeper into research than I already have. Instead, I will live for today -- while enjoying the announcement my oncologist shared with me yesterday. All clear!

Results presented at the 2006 annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, says that it appears Nolvadex (tamoxifen) reduces the risk of developing cancer years following completion of preventative therapy among women who are at high risk of developing breast cancer.

Data from a clinical trial, including 7,145 women who were at high risk for developing breast cancer, was reevaluated at 10 years follow up. They found that breast cancer was reduced by 29 percent among women treated with tamoxifen compared to those taking the placebo. The preventative effect on breast cancer, specifically hormone-positive breast cancer, was actually improved at 10 years compared to the five-year follow-up.

The researchers concluded that women who are at high risk of developing breast cancer continue to benefit from tamoxifen, even five years following completion of treatment.

Talk to you doctor if fall in the high risk group for breast cancer. There are individual risks and benefits for tamoxifen and it may prevent physicians from recommending its use in certain women.