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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/27/health/27PILL.html

Study Finds No Link Between Breast Cancer and the Pill

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

he birth control pill does not raise the risk of breast cancer, even among women who started taking it early or have close relatives with the disease, a large new study has found.

The study, to be published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, offers reassurance to those concerned by previous research that showed a higher breast cancer risk for some women. Nearly 80 percent of American women born in 1945 or later have used oral contraceptives, so even a small increase in risk could mean thousands of extra cases of cancer.

For the new study, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health surveyed more than 9,200 women ages 35 to 64, a group that includes the first generation of women to take the pill.

"It was a chance to look at women over a lifetime to see what the risk has been," said Robert Spirtas, chief of the contraception and reproductive health branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. "That hasn't been possible before, because the first oral contraceptive users started off in the 1960's. They're just getting to the age where the breast cancer risk is highest."

Researchers in Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle interviewed 4,575 women who had breast cancer and 4,682 who did not. Seventy-seven percent of the cancer patients and 79 percent of the cancer-free women had taken some type of oral contraceptive.

Regardless of factors like race, weight and family history, those who had never taken the pill were about as likely to have breast cancer as those who were taking it or had taken it. Nor was there any significant difference in women who took the early variety of the pill, with high doses of hormones.

"I think that what was impressive was that, no matter which way you looked at the data, no matter which subset, the result was null," said Dr. Kathy J. Helzlsouer, a cancer specialist in the epidemiology department at Johns Hopkins University's school of public health. "It's nice to be able to give good news to women about something so many women take or have taken."

A 1996 analysis of 54 studies concluded that the pill did seem to raise the breast cancer risk, perhaps by about one-quarter. A more recent study indicated that oral contraceptives could at least triple the risk in women whose relatives have had breast cancer.

Dr. Claudine Isaacs, clinical director of the breast cancer program at Georgetown University Hospital, said the latest study did not look far enough to say with certainty whether the pill raised the risk for women whose relatives have had the disease.

For one thing, women were asked only if their mother or any sister or daughter had breast or ovarian cancer, not whether it had been found in any aunts, cousins or grandmothers, Dr. Isaacs said.

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