Highlights of This Issue

Abstract

Periodontal disease (PD) has been consistently associated with chronic disease but there are no large studies of PD and breast cancer. Freudenheim and colleagues followed 73,737 women in the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study and tracked PD and incident primary and invasive breast tumors. PD, reported by 26.1% of women in the study, was indeed associated with increased breast cancer risk, particularly among former smokers.Herpes zoster (HZ) arises in older people due to age-related decline in immunity. Mahale and colleagues assessed whether HZ is associated with increased cancer risk. The authors conducted a case–control study in US adults aged ≥ 65 years using the SEER-Medicare linked data and Medicare claims. Logistic regression models were constructed to determine adjusted associations between cancer and HZ. HZ prevalence was only modestly higher in cancer cases than controls. This work indicates that age-related immune decline does not play a major role in cancer development in older people.Clinical guidelines for cervical cancer screening have incorporated comparative risks of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 3 or cancer (CIN3+) for various screening outcomes. Gage and colleagues used the New Mexico Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Pap Registry to evaluate cervical cancer screening in a diverse population. Both Kaplan–Meier and logistic–Weibull survival models were used to estimate cumulative risks of CIN3+ among screened women. Similar to less diverse cohorts, in the diverse New Mexico cohort, the HPV triage of stratified 3-year CIN3+ risks were 0.72% for HPV-negative and 7.7% for HPV-positive patients. This supports that strategies for HPV triage of cervical cancer screening specimens are upheld in large clinical practice settings and across diverse screening populations in the United States.Body mass index (BMI) has been associated with breast cancer outcomes, but few studies used clinical trial settings where treatments and outcomes are consistently evaluated and documented. Cecchini and colleagues evaluated 15,538 breast cancer participants from four different treatment protocols and used Cox proportional hazards regression to calculate adjusted hazards ratios for risk of death and recurrence. Investigators did not find a consistent relationship between BMI at diagnosis and breast cancer recurrence or death, demonstrating that the heterogeneity of breast cancer between different breast cancer populations and the different therapies used to treat them may modify any association that exists between BMI and breast cancer outcome.