DR. WEEKS COMMENT:
Estrogen is a hot topic as the Big Pharma company Wyeth tries to force bio-identical estrogen off the US market (while promoting their own bioidentical hormones in Europe!). But, within your own body, for health’s sake, we must seek a balance of your hormones: progesterone (not the synthetic “progestin” called Provera(c) needs to be in balanced with your estrogens (there are 3 of them: E1 estrone, E2 estradiol, E3 estriol) . If these are unbalanced, or more specifically, if you have estrogen excess (called estrogen dominance syndrome) then your cancer risk is unacceptable. Here, in line one of the summary of the article cited below, the author -almost off-handedly – remarks that estronge is a risk factor for cancer and mutations. So be careful and have your hormones levels tested.
(Note: I do not find that salivary hormone testing is reliable. If your doctor uses salivary testing for hormones, please request that she or he do a “split sample” – send two samples of your saliva under two different names (one male, one female; one old, one young etc.) to the lab. Don’t alert the lab and wait and see if both results come back accurately or not. This is responsible corrective medicine.
: Arch Biochem Biophys. 2007 Sep 1;465(1):293-300. Epub 2007 Jun 15.
Catechol-estrogen modified DNA: a better antigen for cancer autoantibody.
Department of Biochemistry, J. N. Medical College, A. M. U., Aligarh 202002, India.
Estrogens are known mutagenic and carcinogenic risk factors. Non-enzymatic oxidation of catechol-estrogens in the presence of copper is reported to generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) that can cause DNA damage. We show that DNA modification in the presence of 4-hydroxyestradiol (4-OHE(2)) and copper (Cu-II) results in single and double strand breaks, base modification, hyperchromicity and change in ellipticity. Modified DNA (4-OHE(2)-Cu(II)-DNA) was highly immunogenic in experimental animals. Induced anti-4-OHE(2)-Cu(II)-DNA antibodies were effectively used as a probe for detecting oxidative lesions in human genomic DNA and for the estimation of 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) levels in the urine of cancer patients. Circulating antibodies from cancer patients showed high binding to 4-OHE(2)-Cu(II)-DNA as compared to native DNA. Our results imply that interaction of catechol-estrogen and copper leads to the production of potent ROS, capable of causing DNA damage, thus playing an important role in carcinogenesis. The modified DNA presents unique epitopes which may be one of the factors for autoantibody induction in cancer.