Even people who carry genetic changes that put them at higher-than-average risk of breast cancer can lower that risk — sometimes by a lot, researchers said Thursday. They predict that close to 30 percent of breast cancer cases among white women could be prevented if all the women did just four things: avoided smoking, drank very little alcohol, kept a healthy body weight and skipped hormone replacement therapy. "Overall, we estimated that up to 28.9 percent of all breast cancers could be prevented if all white women in the U.S. population were at the lowest risk from these four modifiable risk factors," Nilanjan Chatterjee of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Oncology.
