Lower Breast Cancer Risk for Women Who Were Breastfed as Children

Thursday, September 11, 2008 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
Tags: breastfeeding, health news, Natural News

(NaturalNews) Women who were breastfed as infants have a lower risk of breast cancer as adults, according to a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and published in the journal Epidemiology.

"As a general group, women who reported they had been breastfed in infancy had a 17 percent decrease in breast cancer risk," researcher Hazel B. Nichols said. "However, we did not observe this reduction when we looked specifically among first-born women."

Some researchers have suggested that because toxins accumulate in the body fat of adult women - including in their breast milk - then infants who are breastfed may be exposed to more toxins and have a higher risk of cancer as adults. If this is true, then breastfed children of older women should have a higher cancer risk, as their mothers have had more time to accumulate toxins.

To test this possibility, the researchers interviewed 2,016 female breast cancer patients between the ages of 20 and 69, and 1,960 women who did not have the disease. They found that the women who had been breastfed as infants had a lower risk of breast cancer than the non-breastfed women.

Among the breastfed group, there was no effect on cancer risk from the mother's age at childbirth. In this same group, women who were born first had a higher cancer risk than women who had three or more older siblings.

When the researchers compared only firstborn women to each other, there was no difference in cancer rates between those who were breastfed and those who were not.

Among women who had not been breastfed, a mother's older age at childbirth corresponded to a lower cancer risk for the infant. There was no relationship found between cancer risk and birth order.

The results follow those of another recent study, conducted by British researchers and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. This long-term observational study found that babies who were breastfed did not have an elevated cancer risk as adults, and that women who had been breastfed appeared to have a lower breast cancer risk.

Sources for this story include: www.reuters.com.