Lower Your Breast Cancer Risk

A tremendous amount of promising research is under way to determine the cause of breast cancer and to establish effective ways to prevent it. Still, doctors can't always explain why one woman develops breast cancer and another doesn't.

Everyone seems to know someone with breast cancer, and we wonder whether we, too, will be affected during our lifetime. All of us want to do everything we can to reduce the risk of ever getting the disease. Right now, though, we just don't know enough about what causes breast cancer and we haven't yet figured out how to keep it from happening—so we can't say that we can “prevent” it.

However, researchers are working to learn how our “external” and “internal” environments may work separately and together to affect our health and possibly the risk of developing breast cancer. “Internal environment” means the things inside our bodies that influence our health, such as genetics (the genes you got from your mother and father), hormones, illnesses, and feelings and thoughts. “External environment” refers to the things outside of our bodies that influence our health, such as air, water, food, danger, music, noise, people, and stress. Also, the external environment enters our internal environment every day—think of the food you eat, water you drink, air you breathe (including whether you smoke or not), and medicines you take. More subtlely, there's the way you “breathe in” or absorb your environment, such as your home or workplace, and the way you take in energy from the people you spend time with.

Some of these factors, such as your genetic makeup and the medicines that you take, have a very direct effect on your breast health. The impact of other, indirect factors, such as air quality, exercise, meditation, and spending time with friends, is less well understood.