Help Campaign support research into preventing breast cancer
Your gift will support preventative breast cancer research that studies how our diets, environment and lifestyle choices can affect our risk of developing the disease.
A person's lifetime risk of developing breast cancer is made up of many factors: environment, genetics, lifestyle and nutrition. Scientists know that the nutrition we receive in childhood can affect our breast cancer risk in later life.
Your gift will go toward supporting projects such as London-based Professor Diana Kuh, who will use information from the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development. This holds data on over 2,000 women. It includes childhood diets and those who went on to develop breast cancer.
Professor Kuh previously discovered that women who had a higher birth weight and grew quickly in childhood were most at risk of developing breast cancer. They were particularly at risk before they reached the menopause.
Professor Kuh is now looking at the childhood diet of these women to measure its effects on growth and onset of the menstrual cycle. Both factors are known to be linked to breast cancer risk. The project aims to identify if there are any particular stages in our lives at which improving nutrition would decrease our risk of developing breast cancer.
