Ever wondered in case your bra may cause cancer? Apparently, you’re not alone. Several scientists in the University of Washington recently studied the relationship between bra wearing and increased cancer of the breast risk among postmenopausal women. The findings from the population-based case-control study, published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, found no association.
“There have been some concerns that certain of the explanations why breast cancer may be more common in developed countries compared with developing countries is differences in bra-wearing patterns,” Lu Chen, MPH, a researcher within the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center along with a doctoral student within the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said in a recent statement. “Given how common bra wearing is, we thought this was a important question to address.”
“Our study found no evidence that wearing a bra increases a woman’s risk for breast cancer. The danger was similar regardless of how many hours each day women wore a bra, whether or not they wore a bra with an underwire, or at what age they first began wearing a bra,” Chen added in another statement
Chen continued, “There has been some suggestion in the lay media that bra wearing may be a risk factor for cancer of the breast. Some have hypothesized that drainage of waste products around the breast may be hampered by bra wearing. Given very limited biological evidence supporting such a outcomes of bra wearing and cancer of the breast risk, our outcome was not surprising.”
Using a strict epidemiological study design, the study checked out various bra wearing habits with regards to cancer of the breast risk. They observe that the research results ought to provide reassurance the risk for most common histological types of postmenopausal cancer of the breast is not increased by bra wearing.
The research team recruited 454 women with invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), 590 women with invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) – two of the most common subtypes of cancer of the breast – and 469 women without cancer of the breast to serve as controls. All of the participants were postmenopausal women between 55 and 74 recruited from the Seattle-Puget Sound metropolitan area.
In-person interviews were conducted to collect data on demographics, genealogy, and reproductive history. The research team also asked a number of structured questions to assess lifetime patterns of bra wearing-including age where the participant began wearing a bra, whether she wore a bra by having an underwire, her bra cup size and band size, the number of hours per day and length of time each week she wore a bra, and if her bra-wearing patterns ever changed at different times in her own life.
Based on their analysis, no facet of bra wearing is assigned to a heightened risk of either kind of cancer.
