The following
article is by Dr Joel Brind and debunked a large study which "proved" that
there was no link between abortion and breast cancer. To summarize his
main arguments:
- Beral, the lead scientist disqualified several peer reviewed studies
showing a link - in other words, she "cooked the books"
- Beral used a lot of NON peer reviewed studies which may be extremely
flawed.
- Beral used 3 studies which have been proven flawed because aborted
women had not been recorded accurately, as such in these studies - among
these was the famed "Melbye" study about which Dr Melbye remarked that "we
may have missed some of the data on aborted women" - in fact, all
the abortions before 1973 were not included, an estimated 60,000 and when
the study is adjusted to report these 60,000 abortions, it shows a very
strong link between abortion and breast cancer.
- Finally Beral assumed that women who had had breast cancer would be
more likely to report that they'd had an abortion (when she used
interviews of women with breast cancer). Brind states that this
assumption has been proven false on numerous occasions. It has been
the experience of THIS researcher (myself) that women who have had breast
cancer tend to not admit ANY risk factors!
Beral of course, ignores that there is a good physiological reason for a
link between abortion and breast cancer and that is that the body has
created large groups on undifferentiated cells in the breasts which during
the pregnancy will be formed into breast cells. When the pregnancy is
artificially terminated, the body "forgets" about these cells and they
remain undifferentiated which of course makes them a high risk for cancer
later on. It's interesting to note that when the body miscarries, it
seems to clean out the undifferentiated cells so women who have miscarried
naturally do not appear to have a higher risk of breast cancer. If I
am not mistaken Dr Beral averaged in women with miscarriages in her
conclusions about abortion and breast cancer so that would have cooked the
books immediately.
Abortion and Breast Cancer: Only fuzzy math can make the ABC link
disappear
by Joel Brind, Ph.D.
It looks like "déjà-vu all over again": A supposedly definitive study of
immense statistical power, published in a top medical journal, has once
again proven the abortion-breast cancer link (ABC link) nonexistent.
This time (March 25 of this year) it was "a collaborative reanalysis of
data from 53 epidemiological studies, including 83,000 women with breast
cancer from 16 countries". It was authored by a prestigious group of Oxford
researchers, and published in the Lancet, one of the most prominent medical
journals in the world. And lead author Valerie Beral wasted no time hyping
her group’s findings in a frenzy of pre-publication interviews. For example,
she told the Associated Press: "The totality of the worldwide
epidemiological evidence indicates that pregnancies ended by induced
abortion do not have adverse effects on women's subsequent risk of
developing breast cancer". "Scientifically, this really is a full analysis
of the current data", Beral told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
suggesting a truly comprehensive review of the data.
To say that the Beral study is seriously flawed and that its conclusions
do not stand up to close scrutiny is to understate seriously the magnitude
of what is really going on here. For starters, the claim that this is a
"full analysis" is flatly false. Let’s just do the simple math. We start
with 41 studies which showed data on induced abortion and breast cancer,
dating as far back as 1957. Then how do we get to 53 studies? (Actually, the
total is 52 studies.) We add 11 studies worth of unpublished data, right?
That might be okay, but it wasn’t what was done. What Beral et al. actually
did was:
1) Throw out 2 studies for the scientifically appropriate reason that
"specific information on whether pregnancies ended as spontaneous or induced
abortions had not been recorded systematically for women with breast cancer
and a comparison group." Specifically, one such study from Sweden in 1989
used general population statistics for comparison, instead of a control
group, and one US study from 1993 ascertained abortions only indirectly, by
subtracting the number of children from the number of pregnancies.
2) Throw out 11 more perfectly good studies for reasons such as: "Principal
investigators ... could not be traced" (We can’t find Professor Einstein,
either. Does that mean we throw out relativity?); "original data could not
be retrieved by the principal investigators", "researchers declined to take
part in the collaboration", or investigators "judged their own information
on induced abortion to be unreliable" (even though it had been published in
a prominent medical journal).
3) Finally, 4 studies’ worth of data (one on French women, one on Chinese
women, One on Russian women, and one on African-American women) were simply
not even mentioned, even though they had been previously published as
abstracts or included in other reviews.
That brings the total down from 41 to only 24 studies. Now we add 28
studies worth of unpublished data, and Voilà! We have 52 studies. The fact
that the majority of studies have not stood the test of peer review is
troubling enough. But a closer look at the excluded studies is even more
revealing.
Of the 41 studies which have been previously published, 29 actually show
increased risk of breast cancer among women who have chosen abortion.
(Epidemiologists call this a "positive association".) 16 of these are
statistically significant, which means there is at least a 95% certainty
that the results cannot be explained by chance. Getting back to Beral’s
"full analysis", 10 of the 16 significantly positive studies in the
literature were excluded for one of the unscientific reasons cited above. In
fact, if we average all of the 15 studies Beral excluded for unscientific
reasons, they show an average breast cancer risk increase of 80% among women
who had chosen abortion.
So if we just add up all the studies Beral’s group decided selectively
to include, we get no significant effect of abortion on breast cancer risk.
But we haven’t even gotten to Beral’s main argument yet. She actually
divided the included studies into two types; those which used retrospective
methods of data collection (i.e., interviews of breast cancer patients v.
control subjects), and those which used prospective methods (i.e., medical
records taken long before breast cancer diagnosis). The retrospective
data-based studies are thought to be less reliable, because, as Beral told
the Washington Post, women with breast cancer "are more likely than healthy
women to reveal they had an abortion, leading to the conclusion that there
are more abortions among this group".
Readers may recognize this "reporting bias" or "response bias" argument,
used for over a decade now to dismiss the overwhelming majority of studies
(which are retrospective data-based) which reveal an abc link. It is
actually a hypothesis worthy of testing. The trouble is, tests for such bias
have proven negative over and over and over again in the published
literature, in studies as far flung as Japan, the US and Greece. In fact,
Beral still reaches back to a 1991 Swedish study, which was the only one
ever to claim direct evidence of such "reporting bias". However, that
study’s conclusion depended upon the assumption--since publicly retracted by
the original authors--that breast cancer patients had "overreported"
abortions (i.e., reported abortions that had never taken place.)
That brings up another serious flaw in the Beral study, specifically,
the exclusion of any published critiques of studies she found acceptable.
She included uncritically, for example, data from a 1990 study on Norwegian
women which study had found no link. However, in 1998 our own group
published a rigorous, mathematical proof that those data were incorrectly
compiled, and had actually indicated increased risk among Norwegian women.
Getting back to the reporting bias argument, Beral separately compiled
all the studies that used prospective methodology (13 studies) and those
that used retrospective methods (39 studies), and found the results to be
significantly different. Specifically, the former showed a significant
overall 7% decrease in risk with abortion, while the latter showed a
significant overall 11% increase in risk.
Beral’s conclusion? "We have demonstrated that a certain group of
studies (the ones with retrospective data) are unreliable and can't be
trusted,", she told the Washington Post." There are only two things wrong
with that conclusion.
First, it is completely illogical to leap to the conclusion that, just
because there is a difference in the overall results reached by the two
types of studies, that the difference is caused by reporting bias. This is
especially true in light of the fact that such bias has been repeatedly
demonstrated NOT to exist.
Second, at least three of the prospective data-based studies are so
seriously flawed themselves as to merit exclusion from the Beral study on
the basis of information on abortions having "not been recorded
systematically" (see above.) Specifically, these studies included the 1997
Melbye study from Denmark, in which ALL the data on legal abortions before
1973 were missing (only 80,000 abortions on 60,000 women!), A 2001 study in
the UK (an Oxford University study, no less), in which over 90% of the
abortions in the study population were unrecorded and a 2003 Swedish study,
in which data on all abortions after the most recent childbirth were
missing. (In Sweden, where abortion is used predominantly to limit family
size, that means most of the abortion records for women in the study were
missing.) We have published detailed critiques of these studies but, as
noted above, these critiques are not cited in Beral’s "full analysis".
Another telling aspect of the Beral paper is the graphic depicting the
compilation of studies. As noted above, most of the studies which showed
significant elevations in risk with induced abortion were inappropriately
excluded from the analysis. Then, by combining certain groups of studies and
graphing them as "other", it is made to look AS IF NO STUDY EVER FOUND A
RELATIVE RISK HIGHER THAN 1.4! In fact, 6 studies (two on Japanese women,
two on African-American women, one on Chinese women and one on Australian
women) have reported overall relative risks greater than 2.0 (i.e., more
than a 100% risk increase with abortion.
Finally, I believe an editorial note is in order, because the knee-jerk
reaction of so many is to put credence in studies that come from such high
places as the Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine or the National
Cancer Institute. As one who has been doing battle on the ABC link in
medical and scientific journals and in other public forums for over a
decade, nothing has been more obvious to me than the systematic denial of
the link from organized science and medicine. In fact, the first study which
was specifically designed to "reassure" the public about the safety of
abortion vis-à-vis breast cancer was published way back in 1982, and
originated from the same cancer research epidemiology unit at Oxford’s
Radcliffe Infirmary as Beral’s "full analysis".
But if the reader would remain skeptical of this writer’s observations
and conclusions, consider this. It is undisputed--even by Beral
herself--that a full-term pregnancy lowers a woman’s long term risk of
breast cancer, and that this protection is not afforded by a pregnancy that
ends in induced abortion. Yet Beral and most of mainstream science and
medicine would refuse to say that abortion is therefore a risk factor. In
fact, the studious avoidance of characterizing abortion in this way is
obvious in the very caption of Beral’s summary chart: "Relative risk of
breast cancer, comparing the effects of having had a pregnancy that ended as
an induced abortion versus effects of never having had that pregnancy." If
the same convoluted standard were used in characterizing hormone replacement
therapy (HRT) for postmenopausal women, it would also not show up as a risk
factor. Specifically, using the same standard would mean comparing
postmenopausal women using HRT to premenopausal women of the same age. The
conclusion of such a study would be that women using HRT have no greater
risk of breast cancer, compared to not having gone into menopause. Instead
(and this is no more clearly stated than in Beral’s own "Million Woman
Study" on HRT and breast cancer, published last year), the study is
restricted to postmenopausal women, with those taking HRT thus compared to
women who get virtually no estrogen and progesterone at all, from inside or
outside. So of course HRT shows up as a risk factor--as well it should.
Everyone knows--including Beral--that a woman who chooses abortion will end
up with a higher long term risk of breast cancer than would result from the
childbirth choice. Still, unethical and outrageous as it is, it is
politically incorrect to inform women seeking abortion of this undeniable
truth.
Citing: Collaborative Group on Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer. Breast
cancer and abortion: collaborative reanalysis of data from 53
epidemiological studies, including 83 000 women with breast cancer from 16
countries. Lancet 2004; 363: 1007-16. 27 March 2004
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