Environmental factors, metabolic profile, hormones and breast and endometrial cancer risk

Abstract

Breast cancer is the leading cancer among women in the Western world. In Norway, 2,503 cases of female breast cancer were diagnosed in 2000, which corresponds to an age-adjusted incidence rate of 72.1 per 100,000 women per year (1). The risk of breast cancer increases with age from puberty, doubling about every 10 years until the menopause, when the rate of increase slows dramatically and a flattening of the age-specific incidence curve is observed in some populations (1). In general, breast cancer spreads to distant organs and progresses to fatal disease more rapidly the younger the woman is at the time of diagnosis (2). This has made breast cancer the leading cause of death among Norwegian women aged 35-55 years in 2001 (3). Endometrial cancer is the most common type of malignant tumour in the uterine corpus. In Norway, 554 cases of corpus uteri cancer were diagnosed in 2000, which corresponds to an age-adjusted incidence rate of 14.6 per 100,000 women per year (1). In contrast to breast cancer, endometrial cancer is entirely a disease of middle-aged and elderly women.