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Some risk factors known to increase the odds of breast cancer in white women have less impact on Hispanic women, a new study shows.

For instance, for postmenopausal women in the study, “recent hormone use and younger age at menarche did not appear to play as big a role in Hispanics,” said Dr. Lisa M. Hines, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Colorado and lead author of the study, published online April 26 in Cancer.

For younger women studied, family history and taller height — found in general to slightly increase breast cancer risk, Hines said — did not appear to be as strongly linked with breast cancer among Hispanics as among whites, the study found.

Researchers have long known that breast cancer rates, as well as death rates from the disease, vary by ethnic group. For instance, according to a national database, Hispanic women are less likely to get breast cancer than are white women, with 89 of every 100,000 Hispanic women getting a breast cancer diagnosis, compared with 132 of every 100,000 non-Hispanic white women.

However, Hispanic women are more likely to die from the disease, the statistics show.

“That’s been known for a long time,” Hines said. “The question is why.”

About 15 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic, and their numbers are growing, Hines noted, but few studies have looked at breast cancer risk in the Hispanic population to see if the accepted risks for breast cancer — identified from analyses that included predominately white populations — hold for Hispanic women.

For the new study, Hines and her colleagues analyzed information on white and Hispanic women enrolled in the 4-Corners Breast Cancer Study, so named because participants lived in New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Colorado, four states whose boundaries touch at one point.

They evaluated data on 4,809 women — 3,134 postmenopausal and 1,675 premenopausal. Women with breast cancer had been diagnosed from 1999 to 2002. All participants had been asked about accepted factors known to affect breast cancer risk, including their reproductive history, activity level, height, hormone use, alcohol intake and family history.

The links for some risk factors were either weaker or not found at all in postmenopausal Hispanic women, who did not seem to be affected by recent hormone therapy use or by having started their menstrual periods at a younger age, the study found.

Among younger Hispanic women, taller height and family history were not found to be linked with increased risk, as they were among white women.

The established risk factors accounted for up to 75 percent of the breast cancers in premenopausal white women, but just 36 percent of the cancers in premenopausal Hispanic women, the study found. For older women, the established risk factors accounted for 62 percent of the cancers in white women and just 7 percent of those in Hispanic women.

Exactly why different risk factors have a different impact is not known, Hines said.

The results also beg the question: Are there other unknown risk factor that elevate Hispanics’ breast cancer risk? More study is needed in both areas, she said.

Jane Delgado, president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health in Washington, D.C., said the research was welcome and timely.

“As one in every six women is Hispanic, it is good to do a study like this,” Delgado said. “The issue is that we know that cancer is not one disease but many diseases, and how it presents itself is going to show great variability by individuals.”

For now, Hines said, Hispanic women should still follow the same cancer-prevention advice as others. That means getting regular exercise, eating a healthy diet and, for older women, scheduling mammograms regularly.

SOURCES: Lisa Hines, Sc.D., assistant professor, biology, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Jane Delgado, Ph.D., president and CEO, National Alliance for Hispanic Health, Washington, D.C.

Botulinum toxin, which smoothes facial wrinkles through injections of the drug Botox, can also help people who suffer from “tennis elbow,” a new study finds.

But the researchers warn that it must be injected carefully, and there’s a potentially nettlesome side effect, according to the report published online April 26 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Researchers at the Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex at Tehran University in Iran gave botulinum toxin injections to 48 patients with tennis elbow who hadn’t been helped by previous treatments. Tennis elbow, which causes pain and inflammation in the upper arm near the elbow, affects some people who repeatedly move their wrists or forearms while taking part in activities like tennis.

The researchers customized the injection sites based on the length of each patient’s forearm instead of giving injections at the same location in each person. Giving the injection at the same location can lead to insufficient paralysis, Dr. S.M. Javad Mortazavi and colleagues explained.

The treatment reduced pain but also reduced strength levels in the patients, the study authors found. They also pointed out that the treatment isn’t appropriate for patients who need to extend their fingers, and added that more research is needed to figure out whether the treatment relieves pain after four months.

In an accompanying commentary, Dr. Rachelle Buchbinder, of Monash University in Australia, wrote that tennis elbow can cause disability and require workers to take sick leave. There’s still much that’s not known about botulinum toxin as a treatment for the condition, Buchbinder added, and patients may be unhappy if they suffer from a side effect: the partial loss of the ability to move their third and fourth fingers.

SOURCE: Canadian Medical Association Journal.

It’s well-known that smoking is bad for the heart and other parts of the body, and researchers now have chronicled in detail one reason why — because continual smoking causes progressive stiffening of the arteries.

In fact, smokers’ arteries stiffen with age at about double the speed of those of nonsmokers, Japanese researchers have found.

Stiffer arteries are prone to blockages that can cause heart attacks, strokes and other problems.

“We’ve known that arteries become more stiff in time as one ages,” said Dr. William B. Borden, a preventive cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City. “This shows that smoking accelerates the process. But it also adds more information in terms of the role smoking plays as a cause of cardiovascular disease.”

For the study, researchers at Tokyo Medical University measured the brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity, the speed with which blood pumped from the heart reaches the nearby brachial artery, the main blood vessel of the upper arm, and the faraway ankle. Blood moves slower through stiff arteries, so a bigger time difference means stiffer blood vessels.

Looking at more than 2,000 Japanese adults, the researchers found that the annual change in that velocity was greater in smokers than nonsmokers over the five to six years of the study.

Smokers’ large- and medium-sized arteries stiffened at twice the rate of nonsmokers’, according to the report released online April 26 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology by the team from Tokyo and the University of Texas at Austin.

That’s no big surprise, said Borden, noting there’s definitely a dose-response relationship. “The more smoking, the more arterial stiffening there is per day.”

The study authors measured stiffening by years, not by day, but the damaging effect of smoking was clear over the long run.

The finding gives doctors one more argument to use in their continuing effort to get smokers to quit, said Dr. David Vorchheimer, associate professor of medicine and cardiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.

“One of the challenges that physicians face when trying to get people to stop smoking is the argument, ‘Well, I’ve been smoking for years and nothing has happened to me yet,’” Vorchheimer said. “What this study emphasizes is that the damage is cumulative. The fact that you’ve gotten away with it so far doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it forever.”

The stiffening of arteries is “one of the earliest and most subtle changes that occur” in smokers’ bodies, Vorchheimer said. “Some people’s arteries can be safe for a few years. The good thing about that is the possibility that the damage will heal if you give up smoking.”

Another notable aspect of the study was the analysis of the effect of smoking on C-reactive protein, a molecular marker of inflammation that appears to play a role in cardiovascular disease. The study found no relationship between blood levels of C-reactive protein and arterial stiffening.

That finding adds one more piece to the puzzle of C-reactive protein and cardiovascular disease that researchers are trying to assemble, Borden said. “We’re still trying to understand the role of CRP, whether it’s a cause or a marker of other factors that lead to cardiovascular disease,” he said.

SOURCES: William B. Borden, M.D., M.B.A., assistant professor, medicine, Nanette Laitman Clinical Scholar in Public Health, Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York City; David Vorchheimer, M.D., associate professor, medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York City;

A widely used type of antidepressant may help protect cardiovascular health by slowing the clumping of blood platelets, thus reducing the risk of hardening of the arteries and blood clots that can cause heart attack and stroke, U.S. researchers say.

The new study compared 25 depressed patients taking a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) and 25 healthy people who weren’t taking an antidepressant. Blood samples were taken at the start of the study and again four and eight weeks later.

At four weeks, the rate of platelet clumping was 95 percent in the healthy volunteers and 37 percent in the patients taking an SSRI. However, platelet clumping in the SSRI-treated patients was higher at eight weeks than at four weeks. This suggests that SSRIs have the greatest effect on platelet clumping in the early stage of treatment, the study authors explained.

The study findings are scheduled to be presented Monday at the American Physiological Society conference, held April 24 to 28 in Anaheim, Calif.

The researchers plan to analyze blood samples taken after 12 weeks and will also conduct a study using a different brand of SSRI.

“The reason we’re doing this is to better the lives of depressed patients,” study author Dr. Evangelos Litinas, a research associate at the Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill., said in a news release from the American Physiological Society.

“There is clear evidence that depressed patients have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, and we want to eliminate that. Since depression can be treated with an SSRI, maybe the cardiovascular disease risk can also be decreased. We want our patients to live longer and happier lives, without depression or the risk of heart problems,” Litinas said.