The incidence of breast cancer (BC) is influenced by age, genetics, ethnicity, diet, socioeconomic status, and reproductive history. The latter is the strongest and most reliable risk factor besides age and genetic susceptibility (1). Reproductive factors have been associated with risk for BC since the seventeenth century, when the disease was noted to be more prevalent among Catholic nuns. It is now a well-established fact that a full-term pregnancy early in life is associated with a long-term risk reduction for developing BC. A woman who has her first child after the age of 35 has approximately twice the risk of developing BC as a woman who has a child before age 20 (see current NCI Cancer Fact Sheet on Pregnancy and BC Risk). Despite this long-term reduction in BC risk in parous women, epidemiologists agreed at a recent NCI-sponsored workshop on “Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer” (http://nci.nih.gov/cancerinfo/ere) that each gestation increases temporarily the likelihood for developing BC (2). This transient increase in BC risk lasts for a few years after a full-term pregnancy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Kelsey JL, Gammon MD, John EM (1993) Reproductive factors and breast cancer. Epidemiol Rev 15:36–47.
Lambe M, Hsieh C, Trichopoulos D, et al. (1994) Transient increase in the risk of breast cancer after giving birth. N Engl J Med 331:5–9.
Guzman RC, Yang J, Rajkumar L, et al. (1999) Hormonal prevention of breast cancer: mimicking the protective effect of pregnancy. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 96:2520–2525.
Jernstrom H, Lerman C, Ghadirian P, et al. (1999) Pregnancy and risk of early breast cancer in carriers of BRCA1 and BRCA2. Lancet 354:1846–1850.
Al-Hajj M, Wicha MS, Benito-Hernandez A, et al. (2003) Prospective identification of tumorigenic breast cancer cells. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 100:3983–3988.
Callahan R, Smith GH (2000) MMTV-induced mammary tumorigenesis: gene discovery, progression to malignancy and cellular pathways. Oncogene 19:992–1001.
Smith GH (2005) Stem cells and mammary cancer in mice. Stem Cell Rev 1:215–223.
Singh SK, Clarke ID, Terasaki M, et al. (2003) Identification of a cancer stem cell in human brain tumors. Cancer Res 63:5821–5828.
Thordarson G, Slusher N, Leong H, et al. (2004) Insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-I obliterates the pregnancy-associated protection against mammary carcinogenesis in rats: evidence that IGF-I enhances cancer progression through estrogen receptor-alpha activation via the mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway. Breast Cancer Res 6:R423–R436.
Sivaraman L, Medina D (2002) Hormone-induced protection against breast cancer. J Mammary Gland Biol Neoplasia 7:77–92.
D’Cruz CM, Moody SE, Master SR, et al. (2002) Persistent parity-induced changes in growth factors, TGF-beta3, and differentiation in the rodent mammary gland. Mol Endocrinol 16:2034–2051.
Ginger MR, Gonzalez-Rimbau MF, Gay JP, et al. (2001) Persistent changes in gene expression induced by estrogen and progesterone in the rat mammary gland. Mol Endocrinol 15:1993–2009.
Boulanger CA, Ku W, Smith GH (2005) Parity-induced mammary epithelial cells are pluripotent, self-renewing and sensitive to TGF-α1 expression. Oncogene 24:552–560.
Ludwig T, Fisher P, Murty V, et al. (2001) Development of mammary adenocarcinomas by tissue-specific knockout of BRCA2 in mice. Oncogene 20:3937–3948.
Smith GH (1996) Experimental mammary epithelial morphogenesis in an in vivo model: evidence for distinct cellular progenitors of the ductal and lobular phenotype. Breast Cancer Res Treat 39:21–31.
Kordon EC, Smith GH (1998) An entire functional mammary gland may comprise the progeny from a single cell. Development 125:1921–1930.
Kamiya K, Gould MN, Clifton KH (1998) Quantitative studies of ductal versus alveolar differentiation from rat mammary clonogens. Proc Soc Exp Biol Med 219:217–225.
Boulanger CA, Smith GH (2001) Reducing mammary cancer risk through premature stem cell senescence. Oncogene 20:2264–2272.
Henry MD, Triplett AA, Oh KB, et al. (2004) Parity-induced mammary epithelial cells facilitate tumorigenesis in MMTV-neu transgenic mice. Oncogene 23:6980–6985.
Krempler A, Henry MD, Triplett AA, et al. (2002) Targeted deletion of the Tsg101 gene results in cell cycle arrest at G1/S and p53-independent cell death. J Biol Chem 277:43216–43223.
Cairns J (1975) Mutation selection and the natural history of cancer. Nature 255:197–200.
Potten CS, Owen G, Booth D (2002) Intestinal stem cells protect their genome by selective segregation of template DNA strands. J Cell Sci 115:2381–2388.
Smith GH (2005) Label-retaining epithelial cells in mouse mammary gland divide asymmetrically and retain their template DNA strands. Development 132:681–687.
Hope KJ, Jin L, Dick JE (2004) Acute myeloid leukemia originates from a hierarchy of leukemic stem cell classes that differ in self-renewal capacity. Nat Immunol 5:738–743.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Smith, G.H. (2008). Stem Cells, Hormones, and Mammary Cancer. In: Li, J.J., Li, S.A., Mohla, S., Rochefort, H., Maudelonde, T. (eds) Hormonal Carcinogenesis V. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 617. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-69080-3_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-69080-3_6
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-69078-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-69080-3
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)