Frequency of some environmental factors with potential relations to breast diseases among a group of Egyptian females

Abstract EN

This study was conducted to highlight the significant environmental factors that may have impacts on breast benign and malignant diseases.

This study was carried out on one hundred females who came to radiology department to perform mammographic examination.

A complete personal and family history of patients was taken, clinical examination was done, all cases were asked to fill a questionnaire about how often they deal with each item of the environmental factors including (alcohol, caffeine, smoking, use of some material that are commonly used in daily life and known to have estrogenic effect including (food and soda cans, plastic containers, insecticides, detergents and cleaning agent, deodorants and cosmetics) then digital mammographic examination was done for all cases.

Cases with high 17b Estradiol hormone blood level were excluded from the study.

The quantitative data were presented as mean and standard deviations.

Also qualitative variables were presented as number and percentages.

The comparison between groups regarding qualitative data was done by using Chi-square test while the comparison between more than two groups with quantitative data were done by using One Way ANOVA.

The confidence interval was set to 95% and the margin of error accepted was set to 5% .

So, the p-value was considered significant at the level of < 0.05.

Occurrence of benign and malignant lesions, breast calcifications and axillary lymphadenopathy was significantly associated to environmental estrogens containing items namely; use of diet & soda cans, use of insecticides, use of detergents & cleaning agents, use of deodorants, use of cosmetics and use of plastic containers.

Age, BMI of the patient and previous mammographic examinations was significantly associated to occurrence of benign and malignant lesions, breast calcifications and axillary lymphadenopathy.

No significant association found between alcohol intake and axillary lymphadenopathy and between caffeine intake and breast calcifications.

Caffeine intake, alcohol intake and smoking had no significant association with occurrence of benign and malignant lesions.