By Lillie Shockney, R.N., M.A.S.
Jan 13, 2013
It’s tough enough for a child to have to endure a cancer diagnosis and its treatment, but it has become increasingly apparent that radiation during childhood can be a gift that keeps on giving–except that the gift is not a good one. Years later, such radiation treatment confers an increased risk of getting breast cancer in one or both breasts.
It turns out that when mantle radiation is administered to girls during the time that their breasts are still forming and maturing, such radiation can alter the DNA within the breast cells themselves. (Mantle radiation is delivered to a large area of the neck, chest, and armpits to cover all the main lymph node areas in the upper half of the body.)
Later in life, these DNA mutations can develop into breast cancer as women mature and age. Researchers originally suspected that having childhood cancer radiation might over time result in the development of breast cancer, but the exact incidence was unclear due to a lack of data about women’s past histories of radiation in their youth.
New research, however, is now showing this number to have been underestimated. New data reveal that women treated with radiation to the chest for childhood cancer have a risk of developing breast cancer that is about as high as that of women with one of the breast-cancer genes, BRCA1 or BRCA2.
The study that determined this higher risk was conducted by Dr. Chaya Moskowitz at the Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and was presented at the June conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). The research results showed that, by the age of 50, a woman who had mantle radiation in her youth has a 24 percent risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer, an increase that’s similar to the risk of someone with a BRCA gene, who has a 31 percent risk. This risk was even further increased if a woman had high-dose mantle radiation growing up.
In contrast, women who have not received any mantle radiation in childhood have a 12 percent risk of breast cancer.
Keep your radiation records
Most women who received radiation treatment for childhood cancers don’t know how much radiation they received, and in most cases such medical records would no longer exist. So if you fall into this category, or if you yourself have a child who has received radiation as part of their cancer treatment, obtain copies of the radiation records in the form of a treatment summary, so you’ll have this information should it be needed later.