Lights at night tied to breast cancer

WASHINGTON — Women who live in neighborhoods with large amounts of nighttime illumination are more likely to get breast cancer than those who live in areas where nocturnal darkness prevails, according to a study that overlaid satellite images of Earth onto cancer registries.

The finding adds credence to the hypothesis that exposure to too much light at night can raise the risk of breast cancer by interfering with the brain's production of a tumor-suppressing hormone.

"By no means are we saying that light at night is the only or the major risk factor for breast cancer," said Itai Kloog, of the University of Haifa in Israel, who led the new work. "But we found a clear and strong correlation that should be taken into consideration."

Scientists have known for years that rats raised in cages where lights are left on for much of the night have higher cancer rates than those allowed to sleep in darkness. And epidemiological studies of nurses, flight attendants and others who work at night have found breast-cancer rates 60 percent above normal, even when other factors such as differences in diet are accounted for.

On the basis of such studies, an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO) announced in December its decision to classify shift work as a "probable carcinogen." That put the night shift in the same health-risk category as exposure to such toxic chemicals as trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

The mechanism of such a link, if real, remains mysterious, but many scientists suspect melatonin is key. Secreted by the pineal gland in the brain, the hormone helps prevent tumor formation. The body produces melatonin primarily at night, and levels drop precipitously in the presence of light, especially light in the blue part of the spectrum produced in quantity by computer screens and fluorescent bulbs.

Kloog and his colleagues obtained satellite data from NASA that showed in great detail how much light was emitted skyward from neighborhoods throughout Israel.

The team then overlaid a map of that information with local statistics on cases of breast cancer and, for comparison, lung cancer, which is caused mostly by smoking and so would not be expected to be linked to light.

After using neighborhood data to correct for other factors that can affect cancer rates, the researchers found no link between night lighting and lung cancer, they report in this week's online issue of the journal Chronobiology International.

But the researchers found the breast-cancer rate in localities with average night lighting to be 37 percent higher than in communities with the lowest amount of light; and they noted that the rate was higher by an additional 27 percent in areas with the highest amount of light.

Abraham Haim, a University of Haifa chronobiologist involved in the study, said the findings raise questions about the push to switch to energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs, which suppress melatonin production more than incandescent bulbs. "This may be a disaster in another 20 years, and you won't be able to reverse what we did by mistake," Haim said.

Cancer deaths rise after 2-year decline

ATLANTA — U.S. cancer deaths rose by more than 5,000 in 2005, a reversal of a two-year downward trend, the American Cancer Society said in a new report.

The group counted 559,312 people who died from cancer.

The cancer-death rate among the overall population continued to fall, but only slightly, after a couple of years of more substantial decline.

The cancer-death rate has been dropping since the early 1990s, and early in this decade was declining by about 1 percent a year. The number of cancer deaths kept rising, however, because of the growing population. So it was big news when the rate dropped by 2 percent in 2003 and 2004, enough to cause the total number of cancer deaths to fall for the first time since 1930.

— The Associated Press