Birth Control ups Breast Cancer Risk

Ivanhoe Newswire
Thursday, November 2, 2006; 12:00 AM

By Vivian Richardson, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Premenopausal women who take oral contraceptives have an increased risk of breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a decade of research.

Lead author Chris Kahlenborn, M.D., from Altoona Hospital in Altoona, Penn., extracted data from 34 studies to come up with his findings. He told Ivanhoe 21 out of 23 retrospective studies suggested women who took oral birth control before having their first child have a 44-percent increased risk of developing breast cancer.

"What's scary about is that no one has really heard about it until now, and it's been in the literature for the last decade," said Dr. Kahlenborn, who has also written about the link between abortion and oral contraceptives.

The estimated risk for breast cancer in the general population is about one in eight over a lifetime, according to the National Cancer Institute. A 44-percent increase of this risk would equal out to about one in five, but Dr. Kahlenborn says it's too soon to judge whether the increased risk associated with oral contraceptives will last over a lifetime.

Dr. Kahlenborn says many women do not know about all the risks associated with hormonal birth control, and the medical community is partly to blame.

"There's tremendous vested interested -- drug companies with a lot of money, government agencies who give a lot of money for contraception. It doesn't make people look good when a study like this comes out," he said.

Length of contraceptive use did not have an affect on the risk level for women who had not had children yet. Among women who have had children, however, use of oral contraceptives for more than four years did increase their risk over those who used them for a shorter duration.

The increased risk of breast cancer is probably the same or higher with other forms of hormonal birth control, like the patch, rings, or IUDs with hormones, according to Dr. Kahlenborn.

"I would expect a higher risk, but a lot of these things just came out five years ago. And what the companies will say is there is not much increased risk because it takes 40 years," he said. "Like with the pill, we're hearing about this now? This was invented in 1960, and here we are in 2006, and that's 46 years to hear about this?"