Birth size in relation to age at menarche and adolescent body size: Implications for breast cancer risk

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http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/104050085/START

Online ISSN: 1097-0215    Print ISSN: 0020-7136
International Journal of Cancer
Volume 105, Issue 3, 2003. Pages: 400-403

Articles Available Online in Advance of Print
Published Online: 11 Mar 2003
 

Copyright © 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

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 Epidemiology
 

Birth size in relation to age at menarche and adolescent body size: Implications for breast cancer risk

 
Pål R. Romundstad 1, Lars J. Vatten 1 *, Tom I. Lund Nilsen 1, Turid Lingaas Holmen 1, Chung-cheng Hsieh 2, Dimitrios Trichopoulos 2, Sherri O. Stuver 2
1Department of Community Medicine and General Practice, Faculty of Medicine, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
2Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA
 
email: Lars J. Vatten (lars.vatten@medisin.ntnu.no)

*Correspondence to Lars J. Vatten, Department of Community Medicine and General Practice, Armauer Hansen Building, NO-5021 Bergen, Norway

There is no conflict of interest related to this article.
Fax: +47-55974998

Funded by:
 Norwegian Medical Research Council
 Norwegian Cancer Society
 National Institutes of Health; Grant Number: R01 grant CA86007

 

Keywords
Birth weight • birth length • age at menarche • body height • breast cancer risk • epidemiology

 

Abstract
Early age at menarche and tallness are associated with increased risk for breast cancer, and emerging evidence suggests that body size at birth also is positively associated with breast cancer risk in adulthood. We have explored whether this effect of birth size could be mediated by influencing age at menarche or body height during adolescence. Information on age at menarche and adolescent height among 3,343 Norwegian girls 13 to 19 years of age, born at term and whose mothers had no history of gestational disease was individually linked to information on birth weight and length recorded in the national Medical Birth Registry. We related quintiles of birth size, adjusted for length of gestation, to age at menarche and adolescent height and weight, using general linear modeling and Cox regression analyses. In a subsample of the population, we also had information on maternal age at menarche, as well as adult height and body mass index in both parents. We explored whether parental factors confounded the association between perinatal predictors and adolescent outcomes in the daughters. We found that age at menarche tended to occur earlier with decreasing birth weight (p for trend = 0.03), and girls who were thin at birth (i.e., in the lowest quintile of ponderal index) had an earlier age at menarche than other girls (p = 0.02). Weight and length at birth were strongly and positively related to tallness during adolescence (p for trend < 0.001), but ponderal index, indicating obesity at birth, was negatively associated with adolescent height (p for trend = 0.002). Adjustment for parental height, body mass index and maternal age at menarche, in the subsample where this information was available, indicated no substantial confounding by these parental factors. Our results suggest that a positive association between birth size and adult breast cancer is not likely to be mediated by early age at menarche, but possibly by increased body height in adolescence. © 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Received: 3 July 2002; Revised: 21 November 2002; Accepted: 3 January 2003

 

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)


10.1002/ijc.11103  About DOI


 

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