Breasts (31 page)

women who work under lights on the night shift:
Joe Russo and Irma Russo,
The Molecular Basis of Breast Cancer: Prevention and Treatment
(Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2003), p. 5.

Studies have found that girls with precocious puberty:
Steingraber, “Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls,” p. 37.

it’s been documented that girls not living with a biological father:
For example, see Julianna Deardorff et al., “Father Absence, Body Mass Index, and Pubertal Timing in Girls: Differential Effects by
Family Income and Ethnicity,”
Journal of Adolescent Health,
vol. 48, no. 5 (2011), pp. 441-447.

Female elephants do something similar:
In zoos, elephants reach maturity at age eleven, compared to sixteen to eighteen in the wild. Unfortunately for them, it doesn’t always translate into higher fertility; see
http://buzzle.com/editorials/10-22-2002-28715.asp
. Wildlife biologists Mark and Delia Owens documented an eight-year-old female with a newborn in a region of Zambia that had been heavily hunted by ivory poachers. The mother, an orphan with no guiding adults, was “not a good mother.” Recounted in Mark Owens and Delia Owens,
Secrets of the Savannah
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 133.

families are actually slightly more stable:
Lise Aksglaede, author interview, July 2009.

the once-rare birth defect of undescended testicles:
Leonard J. Paulozzi, “International Trends in Rates of Hypospadias and Cryptorchidism,”
Environmental Health Perspectives,
vol. 107, no. 4 (April 1999), pp. 297-302.

In a study of 1,600 babies born between 1997 and 2001:
Katharina M. Main et al., “Larger Testes and Higher Inhibin B Levels in Finnish Than in Danish Newborn Boys,”
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism,
vol. 91, no. 7 (2006), pp. 2732-2737. For more on male genital defects and possible environmental links, see Florence Williams, “The Little Princes of Denmark,”
Slate,
February 24, 2010, available at
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex_health/2010/02/the_little_princes_of_denmark.html
.

“In the first photo, a four-and-a-half-year-old girl”:
Orville Schell,
Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm
(New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 283.

One study did find unusually high levels of phthalates:
Ivelisse Colon et al., “Identification of Phthalate Esters in the Serum of Young Puerto Rican Girls with Premature Breast Development,”
Environmental Health Perspectives,
vol. 108, no. 9 (September 2000), pp. 895-900.

recently linked to genital abnormalities:
Shanna H. Swan et al., “Decrease in Anogenital Distance among Male Infants with Prenatal Phthalate Exposure,”
Environmental Health Perspectives,
vol.
113,
no. 8 (August 2005), pp. 1056-1061; S. H. Swan et al., “Prenatal Phthalate Exposure and Reduced Masculine Play in Boys,”
International Journal of Andrology,
vol. 33, no. 2 (April 2010), pp. 259-269; Shanna H. Swan, “Environmental Phthalate Exposure in Relation to Reproductive Outcomes and Other Health Endpoints in Humans,”
Environmental Research,
vol. 108, no. 2 (August 11, 2008), pp. 177-184.

Girls in New York City:
Mary S. Wolff et al., “Investigation of Relationships between Urinary Biomarkers of Phytoestrogens, Phthalates, and Phenols and Pubertal Stages in Girls,”
Environmental Health Perspectives,
vol. 118, no. 7 (July 2010), pp. 1039-1046.

When the BCERC researchers in Cincinnati:
Susan Pinney, Department of Environmental Health, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, author interview, September 2011.

A newspaper in Taiwan:
Shelley Huang, “Smell May Indicate Plasticizers: Experts,”
Taipei Times,
June 6, 2011.

sniffed it out in everything:
Environmental Working Group, “Pesticide in Soap, Toothpaste and Breast Milk—Is It Kid-Safe?” Washington, D.C., July 17, 2008; see also Antonia M. Calafat et al., “Urinary Concentrations of Triclosan in the U.S. Population: 2003-2004,”
Environmental Health Perspectives,
vol. 116, no. 3 (March 2008), pp. 303-307.

“have become ubiquitous in the environment”:
Dominique J. Williams, Division of Health Sciences, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, “Toxicity Review of Di-n-butyl Phthalate,” staff assessment memo, April 7, 2010, available at
www.cpsc.gov/about/cpsia/toxicityDBP.pdf
. See also Susan M. Duty et al., “The Relationship between Environmental Exposures to Phthalates and DNA Damage in Human Sperm Using the Neutral Comet Assay,”
Environmental Health Perspectives,
vol. 111, no. 9 (July 2003), pp. 1164-1169; and Mary S. Wolff et al., “Pilot Study of Urinary Biomarkers of Phytoestrogens, Phthalates, and Phenols in Girls,”
Environmental Health Perspectives,
vol. 115, no. 1 (January 2007), pp. 116-121. For more information about levels of these chemicals in the general U.S. population, see the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals,
July 2010, available at
http://www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/
.

It has been associated with liver toxicity:
See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Chemical Information: Di-2-ethylhexyl Phthalate,”
National Report on Human Exposure to Environment Chemicals,
November 15, 2010, available at
www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/pdf/FourthReport.pdf
.

“The results were rather striking to us”:
G. D. Bittner et al., “Most Plastic Products Release Estrogenic Chemicals: A Potential Health Problem That Can Be Solved,”
Environmental Health Perspectives,
vol. 119, no. 7 (2011), pp. 989-996.

Some scientists argue that in addition to our genome:
For example, see Christopher Paul Wild, “Complementing the Genome with an ‘Exposome’: The Outstanding Challenge of Environmental Exposure Measurement in Molecular Epidemiology,”
Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention,
vol. 14, no. 8 (2005), pp. 1847-1850.

atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
On breast cancer rates among Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb survivors, see Masayoshi Tokunaga et al., “Incidence of Female Breast Cancer among Atomic Bomb Survivors, 1950-1985,”
Radiation Research,
vol. 182, no. 2 (1994), pp. 209-223.

Women with the BRCA genes:
Nancy Langston,
Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 12.

“ecological disorder”:
Steingraber, “Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls,” p. 59.

recent experiments with adolescent rats:
For research on fat and inflammation in adolescent mice, see Sandra Z. Haslam, “Is There a Link between a High-Fat Diet during Puberty and Breast Cancer Risk?”
Women’s Health,
vol. 7, no. 1 (2011), pp. 1-3.

Forty-four percent of TV ads:
Charles Atkins, professor, Department of Communications, Michigan State University, author interview, November 2008.

“The beginning is glorious”:
Nora Ephron,
Heartburn
(New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 45.

a woman who has her first child before age twenty:
National Cancer Institute Fact Sheet, “Reproductive History and Breast Cancer Risk,” May 10, 2011, available at
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/pregnancy
.

in the 1930s the average age:
Associated Press, “Age Increases for Motherhood,”
St. Petersburg Times,
December 2, 1948.

Before 1960, nearly one-third of American females:
“Teen Pregnancy,”
Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society,
2008, at
http://www.faqs.org/childhood/So-Th/Teen-Pregnancy.html
.

Since 1970, the percentage of women:
T. J. Mathews and Brady E. Hamilton, “Delayed Childbearing: More Women Are Having Their First Child Later in Life,”
National Center for Health and Statistics Data Brief,
no. 21 (August 2009), available at
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db21.pdf
.

Lakshmanaswamy envisions a hormone patch:
Raj Lakshmanaswamy, assistant professor of pathology, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, author interview, September 30, 2010.

developing a fake-pregnancy drug:
As you might imagine, the idea of giving healthy women large doses of hormonal drugs to prevent a disease they might never get is still extremely controversial. Of course, millions of healthy women are already taking hormones—witness the pill. In another scheme, Malcolm Pike has been thinking for years about how to incorporate his cancer-protection ideas into a contraceptive device. Pike wants to essentially “fix” the pill so that it prevents
breast cancer at the same time that it prevents pregnancy. “The amazing thing is that tens of millions of women took the pill this morning,” he says. “If only one could get it right, one could get at the disease.” Rather than a pill mimicking pregnancy in order to work, though, Pike envisions a better pill as more closely mimicking menopause. Currently, the pill stops ovulation, which is good for preventing cancer. But then the pill essentially replaces all those natural hormones, which is not good. Pike wants to stop ovulation by a different route, by blocking an upstream hormonal signal from the hypothalamus called gonadotropin-releasing hormone, or GnRH. Then he’d put back only a small amount of the lost estrogen and progesterone, just enough to keep women from feeling like crones, but not enough to stimulate breast or uterine cells. Problematically, GnRH is a peptide and would break down in the stomach if taken as a pill, so Pike has imagined this anticancer elixir as a nasal spray. He had the whole spritzing device packaged and ready to bring to market about ten years ago, but he couldn’t get any investors or pharmaceutical companies to bite. “The best thing I ever did was to propose adding a third component to the pill,” he now reminisces. “I still have to find a pharmaceutical company that would be willing to market it and that’s a big
if.
I still think something like this is the way to go. Stop ovulation. Some way. It won’t happen in my lifetime. We’ll sort it out; it’s just slow.”

Janet Daling published results:
Janet R. Daling et al., “Risk of Breast Cancer among Young Women: Relationship to Induced Abortion,”
Journal of the National Cancer Institute,
vol. 86, no. 21 (1994), pp. 1584-1592.

Pro-life groups even sought legal action:
Chinué Turner Richardson et al., “Misinformed Consent: The Medical Accuracy of State-Developed Abortion Counseling Materials,”
Guttmacher Policy Review,
vol. 9, no. 4 (2006), pp. 6-11.

“was wonderfully rapid and its course excessively malignant”:
Samuel Weissel Gross,
A Practical Treatise on Tumors of the Mammary Gland
(New York: D. Appleton, 1880), p. 146.

A study in 2011 found that the more times a woman gives birth:
Amanda I. Phipps et al., “Reproductive History and Oral
Contraceptive Use in Relation to Risk of Triple-Negative Breast Cancer,”
Journal of the National Cancer Institute,
vol. 103, no. 6 (2011), pp. 470-477.

In the United States, about 3,500 cases:
Karen Hassey Dow, “Pregnancy and Breast Cancer,”
Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing,
vol. 29, no. 6 (2000), pp. 634-640.

“First we nursed our babies”:
Mary McCarthy,
The Group
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1991), p. 291.

“crawl” to the nipple:
Marshall Klaus has written a nice description of the breast crawl in the journal
Pediatrics:
“While moving up, he often turns his head from side to side. As he comes close to the nipple, he opens his mouth widely and, after several attempts, makes a perfect placement on the areola of the nipple.” In addition to visual cues, scent also plays a major role in the crawl. If the right breast is washed with soap and water, the infant will crawl to the left breast and vice versa. Marshall Klaus, “Mother and Infant: Early Emotional Ties,”
Pediatrics,
vol. 102, no. 5 (1998), pp. 1244-1246.

Breast-feeding may have helped the species evolve:
Before the recent dawn of antibiotics, many women died shortly after childbirth, not only from puerperal fever (a post-hemorrhage infection of the genital tract), but also from “milk fever,” or breast infections. To help prevent dangerously engorged breasts, sometimes small puppies were brought in to suck off the milk (I kid you not). Women also applied “suction cups” to each other. For more in this vein, read Valerie Fildes’s excellent
Breasts, Bottles and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986).

“slight sleepiness, euphoria”:
Klaus, “Mother and Infant.”

It was the late 1960s:
Penny Van Esterik, “The Politics of Breastfeeding,” in Stuart-Macadam and Dettwyler (eds.),
Breastfeeding,
p. 149.

Archaeologists have found four-thousand-year-old graves:
Tina Cassidy,
Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), p. 235.

the tight corsets of the Restoration:
Fildes,
Breasts, Bottles and Babies,
p. 102.

“while taking every precaution”:
Plato, quoted in Naomi Baumslag and Dia Michels,
Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding
(Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1995), p. 40.

“If a man has given his son to a wet-nurse”:
Quoted from C. H. W. Johns,
Babylonian and Assyrian Laws and Letters
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1904), p. 61.

Even today, a child born in a developing country:
Baumslag and Michels,
Milk, Money, and Madness,
p. 8.

mortality rates reached 50 percent:
Claire Tomalin,
Jane Austen: A Life
(New York: Knopf, 1997), pp. 7-9.