NEWS: Young Black Women Prone to Cancer, Precocious Puberty, and Getting Fucked Over

The study, to be published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to measure how common the different genetic subtypes of breast tumors are in American women, and to sort the subtypes by race. The authors said more research was needed to test their conclusions.



The finding has no immediate practical value for patients, because there is no treatment that specifically aims at basal-like tumors. But scientists are trying to create drugs that will.



The discovery helps explain something that was already known: although breast cancer is less common in blacks than whites, when black women do develop the disease they are more likely to die from it, especially if they are under 50. Among those younger women, the breast cancer death rate in blacks is 11 per 100,000, compared with only 6.3 in whites.



The new information about tumor types is not the whole story, researchers say, because some of the disparity may also be a result of lack of access to health care among blacks or differences in nutrition, personal habits or environmental exposures.

Most cases of precocious puberty have no known cause. In some cases, the pituitary gland, which regulates the release of most of the body's hormones, signals the ovaries and testicles to begin hormone production prematurely. Signs of puberty may also appear early because of ovary and testicle abnormalities. Your child's doctor may want to do some tests to find out if there is an underlying medical condition. Some causes of early puberty include McCune-Albright Syndrome, and spina bifida with hydrocephalus.

[Chandra Tiwary, former chief of paediatric endocrinology at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, said,] "I believe that the frequency of sexual precocity can be reduced simply if children do not use those hair products," he says.



The products are sold as shampoos or treatments to deep-condition dry, brittle hair. The labels usually state that they contain placenta, hormones or "estrogen", although not all products that make such claims contain active hormones. While New Scientist's inquiries suggest such products are no longer sold in Europe, many are still available worldwide over the Internet.



And they remain popular among African Americans. A small study published earlier this year by Su-Ting Li of the Child Health Institute in Seattle suggests that nearly half of African-American parents use such products, and that most also use them on their children.



For other ethnic groups the figure is under 10 per cent. Tiwary told New Scientist that he has carried out a bigger, as yet unpublished, survey of 2000 households that confirms these findings.

kaffeine said:
I couldn't find anything at the EWG Report, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

Either way, most beauty products already contain ingredients which contribute to making people sick, sterile, or even cancerous, regardless of ethnicity. It's pretty gross.

Laughing_Man said:

Come on, without those beauty products women wouldn't stand out and be able to reproduce with men. Getting cancer is just a risk they have to take so they don't become old spinster wives. [edit]--err old spinsters. I guess they probably wouldn't be "wives".

[Edited on Jun 08, 2006 11:55AM]

Nixon said:
WTF?

Are you really just making shit up, or do you have ANY scientific backing on this? Because if you don't, this is a really irresponsible post.

Placenta is used in many hair products, including many pricey ones aimed at fancy white-girl salons. Placenta is made mostly of veins, blood supplies, and fatty tissues. Even if it was MADE of estrogen, hair is dead. It doesn't absorb anything into the body. Admittedly, hormones can be absorbed through the skin, as in birth control patches, but it's a slow process. It's a patch, not a cream.

As for precocious puberty, it's not a black problem. The average age of puberty has been dropping about a year for every decade since the 1950s, across the board. Not just here in the US, either. In fact, all developed countries. Good nutrition is most likely the main "culprit", although BGH is implicated in a few studies. Yes, 8 is crazy young. But bell curves are bell curves, and that's the leading edge.

OK, I'll quit ranting now. But you just took a major leap from an actual study with implications of helping a huge number of people to what appears to be your own personal flight of fancy.

[Edited on Jun 08, 2006 by Nixon]