Does pregnancy secretion aggravate breast cancer?

Many breast cancer patients wonder if they can get pregnant and if pregnancy will make their disease worse. There is no clear diagnosis for this issue. Pregnancy will increase the estrogen in your body by a thousand times, and as we know, estrogen can promote the growth of cancer cells.

Breast surgeons say: From an epidemiological point of view, the risk of breast cancer is highest during pregnancy or after childbirth. Therefore, it is not uncommon for women to develop cancer shortly after pregnancy or childbirth because the hormone levels in their bodies are much higher than usual at this time. We don't know whether those hormones cause breast cancer or promote breast cancer, but there may be a connection. Ironically, after childbirth, the breast tissue matures and the impact of hormones on women is much less. High levels of estrogen and progesterone do not necessarily cause breast cancer, but "it will definitely accelerate the growth of cancer cells."

Experts explain that pregnancy doesn't make cancer spread to other parts of the body: When you finish treatment, your cancer may or may not have metastasized (spread). But sometimes it spreads in the form of very small cells (micrometastases) instead of large-scale metastases to the lungs or bones. These micrometastatic cells may have already spread to other parts of your body and lie dormant; perhaps the chemotherapy has made them unable to grow, but they are still alive. If they remain weak enough, the body's own immune function may be able to suppress them. But hormones or other special factors during pregnancy may stimulate these cells to grow and divide. Because there is no known test to test for the presence of such micrometastatic cells, women have no way of knowing whether they will give these dormant cells a huge hormonal boost and put them at unnecessary risk when they become pregnant.

Some existing studies seemed to show that breast cancer survivors were not at increased risk of recurrence during pregnancy. But those studies have proven unreliable. Many of the existing studies are retrospective. Retrospective studies involve interviewing doctors and asking them to recall past cases, rather than following a randomly selected group of women from limited information. Doctors, of course, rely on their medical records to recall, but there may be "recall bias"; that is, they remember only those patients who survived and those they saw recently and rarely remember those they hadn't seen for years or who have died.

Many previous pregnancy studies have included only very small numbers of women and have had many other flaws. She hopes some of the burning questions about women and pregnancy will be answered when her long-term study looking at survival rates five years after childbirth is completed.

But the findings may still provide some help for young breast cancer patients who are considering pregnancy. The study found that women who were diagnosed within two years of giving birth had a higher risk of death than those who had given birth a long time ago or had never given birth. The women in the study were diagnosed between 1983 and 1992 and were followed for an average of nearly nine years. At the end of the survey, 48 percent of women diagnosed within two years of giving birth had died, compared with 23 percent and 24 percent of women who had not given birth and women who had given birth more than five years ago. Tumors seem to be more rampant in women who have just given birth.