Sep 07
28
Does Smoking Increase Breast Cancer Risk?
There have been so many studies going back and forth and back and forth on whether cigarette smoking actually increases the odds of getting breast cancer or not. Some say that active cigarette smoking does not, or should not actually cause breast cancer, while others say that it does. Some say that several years of cigarette smoking will add the risk factors of developing breast cancer among other cancers, but won’t really specify how much more the risk increases from years of smoking.Â
I mean, personally, I’d say from a logical standpoint that since smoking cigarettes, among other lung-blackening items, can increase your odds of getting any type of cancer. Let me explain my reasoning, which won’t sound all that scientific, since I’m ont a doctor, but nonetheless, it does follow logic on the matter.
If you smoke, you deplete your blood supply of oxygen, and also increase the amount of harmful free radicals, which are compounds created by smoking. Free radicals actually attack healthy cells. Therefore, it would only be logical to deduce that if it’s killing healthy cells, it may also assist in their mutation from normal, healthy, productive cells.Â
The very definition of cancer is the mutation of healthy cells into unhealthy cells, and if you’ve got free radicals going about killing healthy cells, it only follows that it may also be creating unhealthy, mutated cells in its wake, or at least depleting the system of healthy cells, allowing the bad ones to take over more readilly.Â
Make sense? to me it does, but like I said, I’m no scientist. At any rate, we do know that smoking causes lung cancer, so we can assume it may also cause other types. No matter what the latest study says about cigarette smoking and breast cancer ( I think the latest one actually does strongly link the two ), I think we better play it safe and figure that avoiding smoking is the best thing we can do for our breast health, to maintain cancer free, healthy breasts for as long as we live.Â
