Some of you may remember back in September 2007, a research paper on breast cancer and the oral contraceptive pill, which appeared in the British Medical Journal and hit the newspaper headlines.
The research had concluded that there was no increased risk of breast cancer from the use of oral contraceptives. As happens with most of these reports, the SBCC phone line started to receive telephone calls from newspaper reporters and television presenters as soon as the press release hit their desks.
In order to give an informed opinion on behalf of the Campaign, I downloaded the relevant article and set about digesting it. Having read numerous other reports on the associated risk of HRT, and having been convinced over the years of the damage done by endocrine disrupting substances, I was slightly sceptical about the conclusions.
The paper had been published in the British Medical Journal and had been compiled from data supplied by the Royal College of General Practitioners and I could find no fault with it. However, I was not completely comfortable with the researchers’ conclusions when I agreed to appear on national television to make a fairly positive statement on the matter. To all those 50 to 60 year old women who had started taking the contraceptive pill in the 1970’s this new piece of research offered the reassurance that the pill had not increased their risk of breast cancer.
However, within a week, the BMJ received numerous letters from researchers and medics pointing out that there were serious flaws in the methodology (the way the researchers had interpreted the data) – and these letters were duly published in the following week’s BMJ.
The original piece of research had compared the breast cancer incidence of women who had never used oral contraception to those who had used it for more than 8 years and found that there was very little difference in the incidence of breast cancer between the number of “never users” and the number of “users”.
The alleged flaw, however, was that no statistical allowance had been made for the use other hormone-related medications e.g. fertility treatment or HRT, thus making the final conclusion questionable. It was also pointed out that the research had been part funded by manufacturers of the pill and HRT!
I tried to have the subsequent controversy raised at the BBC as I felt that the research had been given an unfair and biased amount of publicity – everyone likes (and remembers) a “good news” story and the pharmaceutical companies had achieved an unfair endorsement of their products. Sadly, when I contacted the BBC, the report had already been relegated to “yesterday’s news” and they were disinclined to do another piece on it.
This short article is an attempt to set the record straight. Newspapers and television are quick to sensationalise any new story on breast cancer and women are seldom given a balanced report – whether it be about a new drug or treatment option or, as in this case, research on lifestyle choices.
SBCC is often called to give a quick “sound bite” or a “printable quote” and there is seldom time for much scrutiny. However, a valuable lesson has been learned from this episode and, in future, we will digest any new pieces of research thoroughly before passing comment.
However, the last word on the matter must go to Dr Ellen C Grant who wrote in the BMJ:-
“This study was partly funded by the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, British Heart Foundation and by contraceptive pill and HRT manufacturers. The wide-spread publicity given to this flawed report is particularly unfortunate at a time when breast cancer deaths are falling rapidly. This is because large numbers of women have stopped taking HRT since 2004 to avoid the proven increases in breast cancer, strokes, thromboses and heart attacks.”