Cancer Causes & Control

, Volume 18, Issue 4, pp 431–438 | Cite as

Cigarette smoking and risk of benign proliferative epithelial disorders of the breast in the Women’s Health Initiative

  • Yan Cui
  • David L. Page
  • Rowan T. Chlebowski
  • Judith Hsia
  • F. Allan Hubbell
  • Karen C. Johnson
  • Thomas E. Rohan
Original Paper
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

Objective

To investigate the association between cigarette smoking and risk of benign proliferative epithelial disorders (BPED) of the breast.

Methods

We used data from an ancillary study of benign breast disease that is being conducted in the Women’s Health Initiative randomized clinical trials among 68,132 postmenopausal women aged 50–79 at recruitment. After following the trial participants for an average of 7.8 years, we had ascertained 294 incident cases with atypical hyperplasia and 1,498 incident cases with non-atypical BPED of the breast. We used Cox proportional hazards models to estimate hazard ratios for the association between cigarette smoking and risk of BPED.

Results

Smoking measures, including duration of smoking, intensity of smoking, pack-years of smoking, age at which smoking commenced, and years since quitting smoking, were not associated with risk of BPED overall or by histological subtypes.

Conclusion

The null association between cigarette smoking and risk of BPED of the breast suggests that the carcinogenic and antiestrogenic effects of cigarette smoking on the breast might counterbalance each other and that cigarette smoking might have no overall effects on BPED of the breast among postmenopausal women.

Keywords

Smoking Risk Benign proliferative epithelial disorders of the breast Cohort study 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The WHI program is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, US Department of Health and Human Services. We are indebted to the participants and investigators in the Women’s Health Initiative clinical trials. We thank Mindy Ginsberg and Mary Pettinger for managing the datasets. Financially supported by NIH grants RO1-CA77290 and RO1-CA95661.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Authors and Affiliations

  • Yan Cui
    • 1
  • David L. Page
    • 2
  • Rowan T. Chlebowski
    • 3
  • Judith Hsia
    • 4
  • F. Allan Hubbell
    • 5
  • Karen C. Johnson
    • 6
  • Thomas E. Rohan
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Epidemiology and Population HealthAlbert Einstein College of MedicineBronxUSA
  2. 2.Department of PathologyVanderbilt University Medical CenterNashvilleUSA
  3. 3.Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical CenterTorranceUSA
  4. 4.Department of MedicineGeorge Washington UniversityWashingtonUSA
  5. 5.School of MedicineUniversity of CaliforniaIrvineUSA
  6. 6.Department of Preventive MedicineUniversity of Tennessee Health Science CenterMemphisUSA

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