Oncologists, alcohol risk factor for breast cancer but it is underestimated

2023-02-22T15:38:12.045Z

Excessive alcohol consumption is a significant but "still underestimated" carcinogenic factor, especially in relation to breast cancer which remains the most common form of cancer in Italy, with 55,700 new diagnoses in 2022. The warning comes from oncologists on the occasion of the conference Focus on Breast Cancer which, now in its twentieth edition, brings together over 500 Italian and foreign experts in Udine.

Alcohol, says the president of the Italian Medical Oncology Association (Aiom) Saverio Cinieri, "is one of the most important risk factors for breast cancer even if there is a tendency to underestimate it. The consumption of drinks should absolutely not be criminalised, such as wine and beer, but numerous scientific publications have highlighted the connection with breast cancer.There are also other overt risk factors such as reproductive-hormonal ones including early menarche, late menopause and more advanced age at first pregnancy. Finally, a sedentary lifestyle should not be forgotten, a 'disease' that affects 31% of Italian adults".

However, the scientific advances of the last two decades are enormous.

In the early 2000s, five-year survival was just over 76% while now we have reached almost 90% - underlines Michelino De Laurentiis, Director of the Department of Senology and Thoracic-Pulmonary at the Pascale Cancer Institute of Naples -.

The credit for this extraordinary success is to be found in our greater ability to define and identify the various subtypes of breast cancer.

From this passes the strong growth of our therapeutic arsenal even for the most serious forms of the disease". "Today we talk about precision medicine but, in the case of breast pathology, it is interesting to analyze the concept of precision surgery - continues Samuele Massarut, Director of Breast Surgical Oncology of Cro di Aviano -.

Interventions are increasingly personalized based on the characteristics of the patients and the disease".

In many cases, axillary lymphadenectomy can be avoided, at the breast level one is increasingly conservative, while reconstructive surgery, underlines the oncologist, "allows the achievement of excellent results and, where the clinical context allows it, treatment can be proposed intraoperative radiation".

However, one of the most difficult challenges is breast cancer in the metastatic stage, explains Lucia Del Mastro, director of the Medical Oncology Clinic of the Irccs San Martino Polyclinic Hospital, University of Genoa.

There are about 14 thousand, you say, "the new cases that we register every year throughout Italy and for these women it is essential to define a treatment path that is as personalized as possible and which always falls within a multidisciplinary management of the neoplasm".

Furthermore, in the last 20 years, the role of the pathologist has grown exponentially and has assumed fundamental importance, concludes Giuseppe Viale, director of the Department of Pathological Anatomy and Laboratory Medicine, European Institute of Oncology (IEO) in Milan: "International research, also thanks to important Italian contributions, has managed to identify specific biomarkers for the various forms of breast cancer. These represent targets for new therapies that have shown to be effective in both advanced and early disease. And there are at least seven different biomarkers for as many treatments."

Source: ansa

All life articles on 2023-02-22