View of Marin County from Mt. Tamalpais. (Flickr: Steve Mohundro)
Let’s start out with the disclaimers — first, this small study — just 338 samples — has to be proven in a larger study. Second, even if true, we are years away from seeing new treatments.
Still this new research from UCSF is intriguing to say the least. Researchers at UC San Francisco looked at cell samples from women shown through previous testing to be at higher risk of breast cancer. They found that those women were almost twice as likely to have a genetic variation involving a vitamin D receptor. The research was published online earlier this week and will be in the November print edition of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.
Marin County has one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the world. A 2003 study found that the land in Marin was not a factor — a woman’s risk of developing cancer did not go up if she lived longer in Marin County. In conducting that study, researchers had used cell samples taken from the mouths of women — half the women had breast cancer, half did not. Those samples were kept frozen after the study was complete. Continue reading