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http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/104050085/START
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Online ISSN: 1097-0215 Print
ISSN: 0020-7136 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
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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
| References are available in the Enhanced Abstract |
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