News/Interviews

A new study highlights how much of a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer might be in her control. The results suggest that even women with a family history of the disease can reduce their risk if they lose weight and don’t smoke. The researchers estimate that close to 30% of all breast cancers in the U.S. could be prevented if women maintained a healthy weight, do not use hormone therapy for menopause, and cut back on drinking and smoking.

Even people who carry genetic changes that put them at higher-than-average risk of breast cancer can lower that risk — sometimes by a lot, researchers said Thursday. They predict that close to 30 percent of breast cancer cases among white women could be prevented if all the women did just four things: avoided smoking, drank very little alcohol, kept a healthy body weight and skipped hormone replacement therapy. "Overall, we estimated that up to 28.9 percent of all breast cancers could be prevented if all white women in the U.S. population were at the lowest risk from these four modifiable risk factors," Nilanjan Chatterjee of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Oncology.

Ask almost any health-conscious woman who’s mustered under a giant pink ribbon, and she’ll tell you what an American woman’s chances are of getting breast cancer in her lifetime: 1 in 8. But that’s a national average. And as the relative influence of genes, behavior and environmental factors on cancer risk come into clearer focus, women increasingly have begun to understand that they’re not all average. New research is helping to refine those numbers, and to clarify what it would take for a woman to reduce her risk of developing breast cancer. It concludes that, at some point in her life span, a 30-year-old white woman in the United States has a probability of developing breast cancer that lies somewhere between 4.4% and 23.5%.

“A lot of scientific questions in medicine are mathematical [in nature],” said Dr. Nilanjan Chatterjee, Head of Biostatistics Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, U.S. So a sound knowledge of both medicine and mathematics is required to solve these questions. In the case of Dr. Chatterjee, besides medicine and mathematics, he has a firm grounding in statistics too, and this helped him become the first Indian to win the prestigious COPSS President Award in August 2011. The award is given to young statisticians below 40 years. He also won the COPSS Snedecor Award.

The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) annually presents awards to honor statisticians under the age of 41 for their outstanding research contributions and service to further the field of statistics. This year, along with the COPSS president’s award, Nilanjan Chatterjee was selected to receive the COPSS Snedecor award. Chatterjee, known for his important and diverse contributions across biostatistics, epidemiology, and genetics, spoke to Bhramar Mukherjee’s about winning the two awards.