So what caused that drop of 50 per cent in taking HRT? It seems this is what John Lee described as women ‘voting with their bodies’ rather than the medical profession prescribing less.

A study undertaken in 2009 at Stanford University in California found that women who take HRT for more than five years double their risk of suffering breast cancer for every 12 months they spend taking it. Breast cancer is the most common form of the disease diagnosed in women in Britain and one in nine women will develop the disease at some form in their life. More than 45,000 cases are diagnosed every year and about 15,000 women die from the cancer, although survival rates have increased significantly in recent years.

However, the good news is that within a year of stopping HRT the risk of developing breast cancer was almost back to normal. This was not a small scale study either, unlike the original research on HRT, as more than 57,0000 women were studied which enabled the research team to say conclusively that there was very strong evidence that HRT causes breast cancer.

Cancer, wherever it occurs, brings a whole maelstrom of emotions and feelings along with the physical effects and depression is certainly one of them. If a woman with breast cancer takes Paroxetine, the generic name of an SSRI drug now commonly prescribed for depression, there is a serious risk to consider.

Paroxetine may be given under the trade names of Seroxat or Paxil and if taken at the same time as Tamoxifen has an increased risk of death according to a study published on the British Medical Journal website. Why the increased risk? Because paroxetine itself does not cause or influences the course of breast cancer but it impairs the effectiveness of Tamoxifen.

Whatever the advisability or not of taking Tamoxifen, the reality is that in order to work, it must be converted into an active metabolite (endoxifen) by the liver and antidepressants can interfere with this process. Because it is common for women with breast cancer to be on antidepressants for long periods of time, and although many antidepressants have little or no impact on tamoxifen’s metabolism, paroxetine is a potent inhibitor of the metabolic step that converts tamoxifen to endoxifen.

This latest research was carried out by Dr Catherine Kelly and colleagues at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) in Toronto and they concluded that Paroxetine, but not other SSRIs, in combination with Tamoxifen, was associated with an increased long-term risk of breast cancer death. The researchers estimate that treatment with paroxetine for 41 percent of the total time on Tamoxifen will result in one additional breast cancer death at five years for every 20 women so treated. One of the study’s authors, David Juurlink a scientist at ICES, went further and stated that “these results highlight a drug interaction that is extremely common, widely underappreciated and potentially life-threatening, yet uniformly avoidable.”

This means that the choice of antidepressant can significantly influence survival in women taking Tamoxifen for breast cancer, so needs to be thoroughly discussed with your doctor or cancer team. Any women currently taking this potentially lethal duo also needs to discuss withdrawal of the antidepressant as it should not be abruptly withdrawn to minimise side effects.

Food scientists Dr. Susanne and Steve Talcott undertook a study at Texam A&M University on five varieties of mangos that are most common in the USA. Kent, Francine, Ataulfo, Tommy/Atkins and Haden, in case you are interested, and they specifically tested polyphenol extracts from the fruit on colon, breast, lung, leukaemia and prostate cancer cells.

Polyphenols are natural substances in plants that are antioxidants with the potential to protect the body from disease and this research focused on polyphenolic compounds in mangos known as gallotannins, a class of natural bioactive compounds believed to help prevent or block the growth of cancer cells.

The results are encouraging as the mango extract demonstrated some cancer fighting ability when tested on lung, leukaemia and prostate cancer cells, but really were impressive when tested on the most common breast and colon cancers where they were found cause cancer cells to undergo apoptosis, or programmed cell death.

The researchers documented that the division process cancer cells go through was interrupted by mango extract. This is crucial information, for cells that may be on the verge of mutating or being damaged, mango polyphenolics could prevent this and so prevent cancer.

The scientists have conducted additional research on the colon cancer cell lines because mangos contain small molecules that are readily absorbed in the colon as well as larger molecules that are not absorbed and remain present longer in the colon. That could potentially make eating mangos a potent way to help prevent colon cancer.

Time to add mangos to one of your five a day?