The small study reviewed here found that women who were breast fed as infants had a 17% lower risk of breast cancer compared to women who weren't breast fed. Earlier research also has suggested that there is a link between breast feeding and a lower risk of breast cancer.
In this study, the researchers found that:
Your risk of breast cancer is the result of the combination of many factors. Some of these factors, such as your genes, are with you from the moment you're conceived. Other factors, such as what you eat and the environment you live in as a child, are part of the circumstances and choices of your family. Breast-feeding is an example of this second type of factor.
Other factors, such as the diet and lifestyle choices you make as a teen and adult, are choices you control. You also have control over choices that can affect the future health of your own children. Breast feeding is one of these choices. For most moms and babies, breast-feeding is a better alternative to bottle feeding and offers many health benefits. And one of these benefits may be lower breast cancer risk.
Visit the breastcancer.org Lower Your Risk section to learn more about breast cancer risk and steps you and your daughters can take to lower it.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Adult women who were breast-fed as infants may have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than those who were not breast-fed, unless they were first-born, study findings suggest.
"As a general group, women who reported they had been breast-fed in infancy had a 17 percent decrease in breast cancer risk," Hazel B. Nichols, who was involved in the study, told Reuters Health.
"However, we did not observe this reduction when we looked specifically among first-born women," said Nichols, of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.
A woman's age at childbirth helps predict the levels of environmental contaminants in her breast milk, and studies have suggested a possible link between increased breast cancer risk and the accumulation of these contaminants, Nichols and colleagues note in the medical journal Epidemiology.
To analyze whether an adult woman's birth order, mother's age at the time of her birth, and whether or not she was breast-fed alters her risk for breast cancer, the investigators interviewed 2,016 women, aged 20 to 69 years, with breast cancer, and 1,960 women of similar age without breast cancer.
As noted, women breast-fed during infancy generally had reduced breast cancer risk.
However, in analyses restricted to breast-fed women, those with 3 or more older siblings had a lesser risk for breast cancer than first born women, the researchers found. But breast-fed women showed no altered breast cancer risk according to their mothers' age at childbirth.
Among women who were not breast-fed, reduced adult breast cancer risk was linked with their mothers' older age at childbirth, but the investigators identified no association between breast cancer risk and birth order in this group.
While the current results hint that breast cancer risk may differ according to whether or not women were breast-fed during infancy, additional studies are needed to determine if these associations vary with duration of breast-feeding or according to measured levels of environmental contaminants present in breast milk, Nichols said.
SOURCE: Epidemiology, May 2008
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