Blog — breast cancer

By Sherry LaBeck, ND. ZRT Laboratory. It is highly likely that women aged 60 to 90 have vivid memories of the astonishing healthcare news from 2002 when the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), a comprehensive long-term national health study, was abruptly terminated earlier than expected. The initial trial results sent shockwaves through the medical community and had a profound impact on the lives of numerous women. Furthermore, this news fundamentally transformed the perception of routine menopausal hormone replacement prescriptions for years to follow. The WHI was launched in 1991 as a 15-year trial, one of the largest women’s health studies in the...

Heavy metal exposure can have detrimental effects on a child's development and overall health. However, with the advent of Heavy Metals Testing Kits, parents now have a convenient and accurate method to assess heavy metal levels in their children's bodies. These testing kits utilize dried blood spots and dried urine spots, offering a comprehensive solution to evaluate exposure to a range of toxic heavy metals. In this article, we will explore the benefits of heavy metals testing for children, focusing on the 14 essential elements tested through the Heavy Metals Testing (Comprehensive Toxic and Essential Elements) Profile. Detection of Toxic...

By Shera Dubitsky I was 19 years old when my mom died of metastatic breast cancer. From that point forward, I identified as a “patient-in-waiting.” In my narrative I, of course, would eventually be diagnosed with breast cancer, it was only a matter of when. Each time I went for a screening, I thought, “Is this the time? Will I finally move from patient-in-waiting to just patient?” Every time I felt a change in my body I thought, “Oh this must be cancer.” (Except for the time I had pain in my back and tried to convince my husband I had...

By Dr.David Zava, ZRT Laboratory In 2002 several large-scale clinical studies were published on the risks of breast cancer in postmenopausal women using conventional FDA-approved hormone therapy. These were the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) and Million Women’s studies of women using FDA-approved estrogens and progestogens in the United States and Great Britain, respectively [1,2]. Both studies came to the same conclusion – that estrogen therapy, mostly in the form of oral conjugated equine estrogens, by itself did not significantly increase the risk of breast cancer and, to the surprise of many, was associated with a lower risk. However, when estrogen was...

  Single nucleotide variations (SNVs – formerly single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs) are the most common genetic variations in individuals. Research shows that some SNVs can help predict an individual’s risk of developing certain diseases, such as breast cancer. Although future studies are necessary to further characterize the involvement of SNVs in the etiology of breast cancer, this blog will review up to date literature of what science has discovered so far regarding SNVs within the steroid metabolism pathway and their relationship to breast cancer. First things first – a crash course in genetics. To make an enzyme, just as for...