A new study suggests that breastfeeding for a greater period of time may help protect women from breast cancer, though the effect didn't appear to defeat the higher risk for women who smoke compared to non-smokers.
Emilio González-Jiménez, PhD, lead author of the study from the Universidad de Granada in Melilla, Spain, and his colleagues found out that non-smoking women who breastfed for less than six months is more likely to get breast cancer in a difference of 10 years on average later in life than those who breastfed for a shorter time or none at alll.
Researchers studied past medical records of 504 women in Granada, Spain who were diagnosed with breast cancer between the ages 19 to 91 years in a single institution from 2004 to 2009.
The mean age at detection was 56.7 years amid the 364 women who neither had kids nor nursed for less than three months.
The detection age, 55.5 years, was quite the same with the 109 women who had nursed a child for three to six months only.
But a lot different when compared to the 65.4 years at breast cancer detection, the 31 women who nursed for six months or more got.
Nursing duration was an important factor in the analysis but additional analysis says that smoking history is a bigger factor and breastfeeding was only impacting with the non-smoking women.
The researchers found that smokers had developed breast cancer after 10.9 years while non-smokers had it 21.3 years after. Smokers breastfed for six to three months while the non-smokers breastfed for at least six months.
However, the results didn’t appear to interrelate with the family history of breast cancer. The study was able to establish though that skipping smoking while breastfeeding for at least six months may delay the development of breast cancer.
This research is published online in the journal of Clinical Nursing.
