"Does anyone have any thoughts about whether another cause of lower 
breast cancer rates in the over 50s just might be because 
breastfeeding rates started to increase in a meaningful way in the US 
about 25 years earlier?"

This relates to my looking through Ruth Lawrence's book to find the effect of breastfeeding on breast cancer rates a couple years ago.  To my *total* surprise, there were much stronger influences listed than a woman's breastfeeding history.  See pp 241-3 in her latest (purple) edition.  The woman who has her first child before 18 has 1/3 the risk of someone who has her first child when "older."  The risk is 1/2 as great for women with a first pregnancy before 20 compared to a first after 25.  Women whose first pregnancy is after 30-35 years of age are at 4 times the risk of nulliparous women in the same age group.  These are influences far stronger than any she lists for breastfeeding, and they involve controllable factors.  How many young women are aware of them?  I certainly was not.

That got me started asking some friends to "quick, name one way to reduce the risk of breast cancer."  They all said "mammogram."  Which, of course, is merely detection, not prevention.  When I explained that, they were at a loss for any controllable means of prevention.  How amazing that studies on breastfeeding, childbearing, cabbage-family consumption, and so on (including the intriguing but poorly-researched notion of a connection with bras) - all things we have some potential control over - are almost never discussed.  Especially the studies related to age of parity.  But then... there's way more money to be made in treatment than in prevention, women want careers before family, and so on.  I'm planning to work on a brochure for our local breast cancer alliance.  In the midst of all their treatment info, they need at least one pamphlet on prevention... and they need to make it available to high schools.

Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC  Ithaca, NY  USA
www.wiessinger.baka.com 


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