
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 27, 1990                   TAG: 9003270335
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/4   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: DAYTONA BEACH, FLA.                                LENGTH: Short

SOYBEANS MAY HELP INHIBIT BREAST CANCER

Scientists have long been intrigued by the fact that Asian women have a five- to eight-times lower risk of breast cancer than American women, yet after immigrating to the United States their children develop breast cancer at the same rate of other Americans.

Breast cancer generally has been linked to a number of factors - including high fat diet, obesity based on total calories consumed, having a first child after age 30, never having children and a family history of breast cancer.

Now, a study by a University of Alabama scientist indicates that soybeans, one of the two main staples (the other, rice) of the Asian diet, may work to inhibit breast cancer in rats.

Stephen Barnes, an associate professor in pharmacology and biochemistry, found in his study of 300 rats that those fed diets containing either cooked or uncooked soybeans had half as many (even as much as 70 percent fewer) mammary tumors than rats not fed soybeans.

Barnes said soybeans contain large quantities of phytoestrogens, weak estrogens that he thinks may interfere with the promotion of tumor growth or play a role in preventing initiation of tumors.

He has not tested the soybean diet on humans. Both Barnes and Dr. Samuel Broder, director of the National Cancer Institute, who chaired Monday's session at the American Cancer Society's annual science writers' seminar, cautioned that the animal data cannot be projected to humans.

"What we have here is a possibility that needs to be pursued," Barnes said.

by CNB