¹⁴C bomb-pulse dating and stable isotope analysis for growth rate and dietary information in breast cancer?

The purpose of this study was to perform an initial investigation of the possibility to determine breast cancer growth rate with ¹⁴C bomb-pulse dating. Tissues from 11 breast cancers, diagnosed in 1983, were retrieved from a regional biobank. The estimated average age of the majority of the samples overlapped the year of collection (1983) within 3σ. Thus, this first study of tumour tissue has not yet demonstrated that ¹⁴C bomb-pulse dating can obtain information on the growth of breast cancer. However, with further refinement, involving extraction of cell types and components, there is a possibility that fundamental knowledge of tumour biology might still be gained by the bomb-pulse technique. Additionally, δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N analyses were performed to obtain dietary and metabolic information, and to serve as a base for improvement of the age determination.