Study: Pill Doesn’t Cause Breast Cancer

Whether they started decades ago or this week, women who use the birth control pill have no increased risk of getting breast cancer, according to a massive new analysis of 54 previous studies on the worrisome issue.

The new report should put to rest the lingering fears many women have about oral contraceptives, researchers said at a news conference Tuesday at ColumbiaPresbyterian Medical Center in New York. Their report appears in the current issue of the journal Contraception.

“The absence of any increase in breast cancer 10 or more years after stopping use of the Pill is found consistently for all groups of women studied,” said Dr. Valerie Beral of Oxford University, who led the project involving more than 200 scientists.

“It was also true regardless of how old women were when they began taking the Pill, how long they took it and what type of pill they took,” she said.

Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, a family planning specialist who reviewed the paper and wrote an editorial accompanying it, said in a telephone interview that the analysis combined data on 150,000 women from 54 studies in 25 countries and included almost all the data ever collected on the pill-breast cancer link.

Previous studies have been conflicting, with some showing a modest increase in cancer risk and others finding no link.

“This study is very important,” Westhoff said, “because it includes every bit of good data that can lay (those fears) to rest.”

Birth control pills are the leading form of contraception used by American women, surging ahead of sterilization in 1995 and 1996.