The Connection Between Estrogen and Breast Cancer

Interviewer: You test on this a little bit. the unbalanced estrogen tying to breast cancer. Why is there a connection into just that one part of the body?  Why is that tied so much? What's going on?

Dr. David Zava: Well, It could be uterine cancer, also, but it's a lot to do with the fact that the breast still has primordial cells in it. They still have stem cells in it that are going to be sensitive to estrogen. The estrogen levels usually tend to get too high. It's not that simple to say estrogen is associated with breast cancer, because the women's health initiative study showed that when women take a congregated estrogen, the horse urine, basically, is what it is that they have a lower incidence of breast cancer. Their breast cancer incidence is about half. So that's king of the angel of life. When you've got it in the right concentration. It's not just estrogen that's associated with breast cancer. In the book that I read with John Lee we talked about all the different factors that come into play. Everything sort of moves towards what it's doing to estrogen. Good [inaudible 00:01:21] vocabulary is published research showing that it's really estrogen metabolytes that are responsible. So, it's not estrodial. It's an oxidized form of estrodial. It's a lot things that you do that happen in your life and I think the last hit is some emotional thing that occurs that causes adrenal dysfunction causes a lowering of the DHEA and an increase of cortisol, particularly at night. It tends to flat line. There are many things that occur and that causes immune dysfunction. So it's all these things. It's a domino effect starting to come into play but the one thing I would say in talking to women about developed breast cancer, is there some stressor in their life that occurs probably about two years before the cancer shows up? It's the type of stressor that you don't have any control of. It's not the stress of you, I have a really tough job, I've got to get my kids of soccer. It's the kind of stress, It's the loss of a loved one, job loss, just those kind of things that you just don't have control over. That seems to be associated with the cancer risk more than anything.