Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 16, 2026
Clinical Imaging of Microwave Mammography
Published on: November 14, 2025
Endometriosis and mammographic density measurements in the Nurses' Health Study II
Leslie V Farland1,2, Rulla M Tamimi3,4, A Heather Eliassen3,4
1Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, USA. lfarland@mail.harvard.edu.
Purpose:
Endometriosis and mammographic density have been hypothesized to be influenced by sex steroid hormonal exposures in adolescence and early adulthood. We investigated the association between endometriosis and mammographic density, a consistent and independent risk factor for breast cancer.
Methods:
We conducted a cross-sectional analysis among 1,581 pre- and postmenopausal women not previously diagnosed with breast cancer in the Nurses' Health Study II cohort. We measured average percent mammographic density and absolute dense and non-dense breast area using a validated computer-assisted method. Multivariable linear regression was used to estimate the association between endometriosis and mammographic density among pre- and postmenopausal women separately.
Results:
Among premenopausal women, average percent mammographic density was 43.1 % among women with endometriosis (n = 91) and 40.5 % among women without endometriosis (n = 1,150). Endometriosis was not associated significantly with mammographic density among premenopausal (% difference = 2.00 percentage points 95 % CI -1.33, 5.33) or among postmenopausal women (% difference = -0.89 percentage points 95 % CI -5.10, 3.33). Among premenopausal women, there was heterogeneity by BMI at age 18 (p value = 0.003), with a suggested association among those who were lean at age 18 (BMI < 20.6 kg/m(2)) (% difference = 3.74 percentage points 95 % CI -0.29, 7.78).
Conclusion:
Endometriosis was not found to be associated with overall measurements of mammographic density.
