Melatonin & Breast Cancer

Breast Cancer claims so many lives each and every year, mothers, daughters, and sisters from their families. But Researchers and Doctors are steadily hard at work to figure out the factors that contribute to cancer as well as ways to avoid it. Needless to say one of the obvious ways to counter cancer is sleep, SURPRISE! I know I didn’t see it coming either.

This was demonstrated in the case study by M. Kakizaki attempting to assess the relationship between the duration of sleep and the risk of getting breast cancer. They questioned 23,995 women in the age range of 40-79 years old from northeastern Japan and then separated them by their sleep habits into 4 different sleep groups, those who slept <6 hours, <7 hours, <8 hours, and >9 hours a day.

They found that the patients who sleep 6 hours or less had a greater risk of getting cancer as well as used contraception and be premenopausal. On the other end, patients who were known to sleep 9 hours or more were older, with a low caloric intake, educational level, and other diseases. While those who slept 7 hours showed an inverse relationship between sleep and breast cancer.

Overall there was less of a risk of getting breast cancer with those patients who slept a little longer. The experimenters suggest that Melatonin contributes to this decrease, that being that those with less melatonin being secreted the greater the risk becomes promoting a gonadotropin-releasing hormone.

Okay I have a question; it might be a rather naïve question but it popped into my head. I thought GRH as stated above was only or rather mainly used when presenting the sex of the prenatal fetus, so do we always use this hormone and for what?

I have also come to realize that sleep is honestly SUPER important I mean it can even help decrease the risk of cancer. I mean I’m sure all of us were knew very well that sleep is a very valuable thing before we took this class but going over all these different aspects of our lives that sleep affects is mind-blowing and also kind of scary when you think of it. Like think back to all those ties where you thought “Nah, I’m okay I got this, an all-nighter is fineee” and even still while in the class some nights I’m like it’s worth it to stay up those extra few hours for the sake of my grade. But seriously sleep is crazy important.