Following Milk

In addition to a bundle of joy, pregnancy and childbirth bring major changes to the body, but many aspects revert to their original state afterwards. Once any breastfeeding is done, the milk-producing mammary gland steps back through a carefully controlled course of cell death and resource reallocation. During this process, called involution, women have a temporarily increased risk of breast cancer. To investigate why, researchers took mouse glands at different stages of the process (pink, after one day, with immune cells in blue) and implanted tumour cells. Tumours injected at day 3 of involution grew faster than in mice that had never given birth, but those implanted at day 6 grew more slowly. Unpicking these details will help understand the increased risk. The study also found changes in immune cell activity during the process, which may have significance for the use of anti-inflammatory treatments for breast cancers in new mothers.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Jessica Hitchcock and colleagues
• Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge, UK
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Development, April 2022