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Cataract extraction and risk of breast cancer
Shumin M Zhang1, Walter C Willett, Frank B Hu
1Division of Preventive Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 900 Commonwealth Avenue East, Boston, MA 02215, USA. Shumin.Zhang@channing.harvard.edu
Objective:
To prospectively examine the association between cataract extraction and breast cancer risk among 66,782 postmenopausal women who were 50 years or older in the Nurses' Health Study cohort from 1984 to 1998.
Methods:
Cataract extraction information was collected in each biennial questionnaire since 1984. A total of 2555 incident breast cancer cases were documented during 14 years of followup. The Mantel-Haenszel method and pooled logistic regression with two-year time increments were used to estimate the relative risk and 95% confidence interval.
Results:
We found that cataract extraction was not significantly associated with increased risk of breast cancer; the relative risks were 1.08 (95% CI, 0.89-1.31) after controlling for age and 1.06 (95% CI, 0.88-1.29) after multivariate adjustment for other risk factors for breast cancer. Also, there were no significant differences in the association between cataract extraction and risk of breast cancer according to history of diabetes (p for interaction = 0.11), smoking status (p for interaction = 0.58), and family history of breast cancer (p for interaction = 0.22).
Conclusion:
These data suggest that cataract extraction is not associated with risk of breast cancer and may not be a good indicator of oxidative stress for breast cancer.
