No Link Found Between Wearing A Bra And Breast Cancer

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Have you ever wondered if your bra might cause cancer? Apparently, you are not alone. A group of scientists from the University of Washington recently studied the relationship between bra wearing and increased breast cancer risk among postmenopausal women. The findings of the population-based case-control study, published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, found no association.
“There have been some concerns that one of the reasons why breast cancer may be more common in developed countries compared with developing countries is differences in bra-wearing patterns,” Lu Chen, MPH, a researcher in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said in a recent statement. “Given how common bra wearing is, we thought this was an important question to address.”
“Our study found no evidence that wearing a bra increases a woman’s risk for breast cancer. The risk was similar no matter how many hours per day women wore a bra, whether they wore a bra with an underwire, or at what age they first began wearing a bra,” Chen added in a separate statement
Chen continued, “There has been some suggestion in the lay media that bra wearing may be a risk factor for breast cancer. Some have hypothesized that drainage of waste products in and around the breast may be hampered by bra wearing. Given very limited biological evidence supporting such a link between bra wearing and breast cancer risk, our results were not surprising.”
Using a strict epidemiological study design, the study looked at various bra wearing habits in relation to breast cancer risk. The researchers note that the study results should provide reassurance that the risk for most common histological types of postmenopausal breast cancer is not increased by bra wearing.
The research team recruited 454 women with invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), 590 women with invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) — the two most common subtypes of breast cancer — and 469 women without breast cancer to serve as controls. All of the participants were postmenopausal women between the ages of 55 and 74 recruited from the Seattle-Puget Sound metropolitan area.
In-person interviews were conducted to gather data on demographics, family history, and reproductive history. The research team also asked a series of structured questions to assess lifetime patterns of bra wearing—including the age at which the participant began wearing a bra, whether she wore a bra with an underwire, her bra cup size and band size, the number of hours per day and number of days per week she wore a bra, and if her bra-wearing patterns ever changed at different times in her life.
According to their analysis, no aspect of bra wearing is associated with an increased risk of either type of cancer.
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