Breastfeeding and Breast Cancer: Lower Incidence for Those at Particularly High Risk

We've read about the studies that show women who breastfeed their babies are less likely to develop osteoporosis,  ovarian cancer, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Obviously breastfeeding is not only good for babies but good for mothers as well. Now there's even more good news. A new study, published in The Archives of Internal Medicine [1], used information from 60,075 participants in the second Harvard Nurses’ Health Study and found that breast-feeding is associated with a lower incidence of breast cancer among women who have breast cancer in the family.

The New York Times article [2] reported Dr. Alison M. Stuebe, the first author of the study and an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as saying the results show an impressive reduction in risk and that other studies either hadn’t looked at this particular group of high risk women or didn’t include enough women with a family history of breast cancer to find a statistically significant difference. Stuebe also suggested that breastfeeding may prove just as effective a strategy for high-risk women as the use of Tamoxifen.

Though more research is needed to replicate the findings and Dr. Louise Brinton, chief of the National Cancer Institute [3]’s hormonal and reproductive epidemiology branch, feels the data should be interpreted cautiously, the study does confirm what we already know -- breastfeeding is beneficial for many reasons and should be encouraged and supported as much as possible.