Sign In Forgot Password? Not a member? Sign up now!
27 October 2011
Taking the pill and having a child both significantly reduce the risk of a woman developing ovarian cancer, according to a new study part-funded by Cancer Research UK.
The study, published in the British Journal of Cancer, looked at how various reproductive factors affected the risk of ovarian cancer.
Taking the Pill for more than 10 years had the biggest impact on reducing the risk of the disease, followed by getting pregnant and having more than one child.
Among women who used the pill for a year or less, the risk of developing ovarian cancer was around 28 per 100,000 per year. For women who took the pill for at least 10 years, this risk fell by about half to around 15 per 100,000 per year.
Women who had ever been through a full-term pregnancy had a 29 per cent lower ovarian cancer risk compared with women who had never been pregnant.
Among women who had never been pregnant, the risk of developing ovarian cancer was 34 per 100,000 per year. For women who had at least one full-term pregnancy, this risk fell to around 24 per 100,000 per year.
And the bigger the family, the greater the benefit – among women who have children, each additional child lowered the risk of ovarian cancer by a further eight per cent.
The research is part of ongoing work by the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer (EPIC), a Cancer Research UK co-funded study that is looking into the links between diet, lifestyle and cancer.
Naomi Allen, a Cancer Research UK epidemiologist, based at the University of Oxford who works on the EPIC study, said, “Ovarian cancer is difficult to detect and so prevention is key to saving women suffering from this disease. These results are important because most women don’t know that taking the Pill or getting pregnant can help reduce their risk of ovarian cancer later on in life.”
Research has not yet established how factors like the Pill and pregnancy reduce ovarian cancer risk. One theory is that taking the Pill or getting pregnant changes the level of hormones that can affect a woman’s risk of the disease.
However, while the Pill has a protective effect against ovarian cancer, women taking it have an increased risk of breast cancer while using it (although this disappears after use has stopped).