NIH Women's Health Researchers Rebut Criticisms Of Their Study

Project scientists reject Institute of Medicine claims that their ambitious initiative is scientifically and financially deficient One of the main questions that Women's Health Initiative (WHI) investigators hope to answer, and one specifically challenged by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), is whether a low-fat diet will reduce breast cancer risk. This hypothesis arises from comparisons of epidemiological data from countries with different fat-consumption patterns and of data tracking the change in breast cancer occurrence among migrants moving between some of these countries. Japanese women, for example, have much lower breast cancer rates than do women in the United States, and the traditional Japanese diet contains much less fat than is the norm in the U.S. Women whose parents moved from Japan to the U.S. have breast cancer rates comparable with those of other women in the U.S. The IOM report, however, suggested that these comparisons are based on the amount ...