Birth order and breast cancer risk

It has been hypothesized that prenatal exposure to maternal estrogens may be a risk factor for breast cancer in the offspring. In two recent studies, maternal estradiol levels in the first pregnancy have been compared to those in the second, and in both studies levels were higher in the first pregnancy. If both the hypothesis and the reported findings were true, women born as their mother's second child would be expected to have lower risk for breast cancer than first-born women. Data from 1,468 cases of breast cancer and 4,175 hospital controls from three previously published studies were modelled through multiple logistic regression to evaluate this possibility. The size of the woman's sibship was not related to breast cancer risk. On the other hand, second-born women had, as predicted, lower breast cancer risk than first-born women, although the difference was nominally significant only among premenopausal women. The relative risk for breast cancer, contrasting second-born to first-born women, and the corresponding 95 per cent confidence intervals, were 0.71 (0.54–0.94) among premenopausal women, 0.94 (0.76–1.17) among postmenopausal women, and 0.86 (0.73–1.02) among all women, controlling for menopausal status.