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Girls Who Eat Peanut Butter May Improve Their Breast Health esearch from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, has shown that girls aged 9 to 15 years who regularly ate peanut butter or nuts were 39% less likely to develop benign breast disease by age 30 years. Although noncancerous, benign breast disease increases the risk of breast cancer developing in later life.1 The findings could offer new insights into reducing breast cancer risk, according to the study’s coleader Graham Colditz, MD, DrPH, associate director of prevention and control at Washington University’s Siteman Cancer Center. The research was based on the health histories of 9039 girls enrolled in The Growing Up Today Study from 1996 to 2001. From 2005 through 2010, the participants reported on whether they had been diagnosed with benign breast disease that had been confirmed by breast biopsy. Girls who ate peanut butter or nuts 2 times per week were found to be 39% less likely to develop benign breast disease than those who never ate them. Researchers also found that beans, lentils, soybeans, and corn may also help to prevent the condition but that the consumption of these foods was much lower among the girls, and therefore the evidence was weaker. Although previous studies have linked peanut butter, nut, and vegetable fat consumption to a lower risk of benign breast © JIRI HERA | SHUTTERSTOCK.COM R disease, this study was the first to use reports made by girls during their adolescence rather than by asking adults to recall their high school diets years later. Reference 1. Berkey CS, Willett WC, Tamimi RM, Rosner B, Frazier AL, Colditz GA. Vegetable protein and vegetable fat intakes in pre-adolescent and adolescent girls, and risk for breast disease in young women. Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2013;141:299-306. DOI: 10.1002/cncr.28839 Long-Term Survival High for Patients With Low-Grade Gliomas A study of children treated for low-grade gliomas, the most common pediatric brain tumors, found that nearly 90% were alive after 20 years and that few died of the tumor as adults. At the same time, children who received radiotherapy as part of their treatment had significantly lower survival rates than those who did not. The researchers, from Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center in Boston, Massachusetts, say the results are, to their knowledge, the first comprehensive, large-scale study of such patients.1 The findings were consistent regardless of whether surgeons could successfully remove a child’s entire tumor or only part of it. As a result, the radiotherapy itself may explain the survival difference, the authors say. Delivery of radiation has long been linked to a variety of harmful long-term effects. Many major hospitals have nearly eliminated treating patients with low-grade gliomas with radiotherapy, but the amount of radiation used by other hospitals varies, according to the study’s senior author, Peter Manley, MD. The researchers were unable to determine the precise mechanism driving the association between radiotherapy and reduced long-term survival, such as second cancers or other radiation-induced toxicities. Nevertheless, because of the excellent long-term survival noted among the patients studied, they suggest that physicians treating patients with pediatric low-grade glioma should prioritize reducing causes of long-term toxicity. Dr. Manley adds that multiple options are available for treating these children and these approaches should be exhausted before radiotherapy is used. Dr. Manley and his colleagues analyzed the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program data from the National Cancer Institute on more than 4000 patients diagnosed with a pediatric low-grade glioma between 1973 and 2008. Although nearly 90% of pediatric survivors were still alive 20 years after treatment, only approximately 70% of those treated with radiotherapy were still alive at that time. Other factors affecting survival included tumor location (cerebellum or not), tumor type (pilocytic or not), aggressiveness of the tumor (grade 1 vs grade 2), year of diagnosis (before or after 1990), and age of the patient at diagnosis (younger than 2 years vs older than 2 years). These factors were found to have less of an effect on long-term survival compared with radiotherapy, according to the team’s multivariate analysis. Reference 1. Bandopadhayay P, Bergthold G, London WB, et al. Long-term outcome of 4,040 children diagnosed with pediatric low-grade gliomas: an analysis of the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. Pediatr Blood Cancer. 2014;61:1173-1179. DOI: 10.1002/cncr.28840 Content in this section does not reflect any official policy or medical opinion of the American Cancer Society or of the publisher unless otherwise noted. © American Cancer Society, 2014. Cancer July 1, 2014 1913