ANOTHER BOOK REPORT. and some incoherent babble

Linda and unidentified baby

definitely her cute and freckle-faced stage, but when was that?

 

As many of you know, I am in Borrego Springs, in the middle of the Anza Borrego Desert State Park, located in the extreme south of California.  I am avoiding the gloomier aspects of life in Bellingham, WA, which in many respects (but not winter weather) is the perfect place to live.  Carolyn (Linda’s sister) and Florence (her best friend and quilting buddy) have been visiting me for about a week.  They left this morning.  Owing to the recent residence of two women, the house is unnaturally clean, leaving me nothing in the housekeeping line to do.  It is blowing a hurricane outside , which makes me reluctant to go hiking.  So, time for another blog.

I am reading a book that I highly recommend: Genome, The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, by Matt Ridley.   Ridley is an excellent writer, if you forgive him his penchant for trying to be too cute in places.  What he has done is to take each of the 23 human chromosomes, identify a gene on it that has some interesting effect on human life – and tell its tale.  You might expect it to be tough sledding, but for the most part it isn’t.  It beats  reading vampire novels, anyway.  I like it well enough to have ordered another of his books just now.

But what I really want to talk about is breast cancer.   It has taken me the better part of a year to finally realize how closely related breast and ovarian cancer really are.  It’s not just that they are diseases of women – in fact, men get breast cancer, although not frequently.  The two conditions can be considered closely related because to some extent they result from the same genetic abnormalities: mutations in the BRCA1, BACA2  genes, for instance.  (Only a minority of breast and ovarian cancer victims have  these mutations, but a woman who has them is at much greater risk.)

 It turns out that the same external (non-genetic) factors also affect both types of cancer.  Whether or not you have been pregnant, given birth (are "parous"), breast-fed, and when in your life these things occurred, help control the likelihood of contracting both diseases.  For instance, research* described in the latest Fred Hutch newsletter shows that women who have their first baby late in life (30+, say) are less likely to develop “triple negative” breast cancer.  (Triple negative refers to the lack of “receptors” for several hormones – 3, in fact – which results in rendering the usual chemo agent in breast cancer - Tamoxifen - ineffective.  Triple-negative breast cancer is breast cancer at its nastiest.)  The statistics underlying these conclusions seem  rock solid.  Earlier I reported that having babies, and having  breast fed, reduce the risk of ovarian cancer.  This would seem to place one in a  bind: put off childbirth and lower your risk of breast cancer, but increase your risk of ovarian cancer.   As my father would have said: You can’t win for losing.  The way out of this paradox is to realize that for the most part ovarian cancer is encountered fairly late in life**.  Thus, if you have a baby early – and don’t contract breast cancer – you have improved odds against contracting ovarian.  This is getting too complicated   and I am beginning to confuse myself.  Sorry.

*by Dr. Christopher Li, of U.W. Medical.

**but sometimes ovarian strikes early.  A particular painful example is Rosalind Franklin, the woman who almost beat Watson and Crick to the double helix, who died of OC in her 30s.