Reproductive Factors and Colorectal Cancer Risk: A Population-Based Case-Control Study

Hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) is associated with lower colorectal cancer (CRC) risk among postmenopausal women. However, little is known about the effects of lifetime exposure of women to varying levels of estrogen and progesterone through reproductive factors such as parity, use of oral contraceptives (OC), breastfeeding, and menstruation on CRC risk.

We assessed associations between reproductive factors and CRC risk among 2650 female CRC patients aged 30+ years and 2175 matched controls in a population-based study in Germany, adjusting for potential confounders by multiple logistic regression.

Inverse associations with CRC risk were found for numbers of pregnancies (odds ratio [OR] per pregnancy = 0.91, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.86 to 0.97), breastfeeding for 12 months and longer (OR = 0.74, 95% CI = 0.61 to 0.90), and use of either OC or HRT (OR = 0.75, 95% CI = 0.64 to 0.87) or both (OR = 0.58, 95% CI = 0.48 to 0.70). Similar results were found for postmenopausal women only and when adjusting for number of pregnancies and for all reproductive factors analyzed together. Breastfeeding duration of 12 months and longer was associated with lower risk of cancer only in the proximal colon (OR = 0.58, 95% CI = 0.45 to 0.74).

Several reproductive factors were associated with lower CRC risk in women, including number of pregnancies, breastfeeding duration, and use of OC and HRT. This suggests that women's exposure to female reproductive hormones plays a key role in the difference in CRC risk between women and men and in site-specific CRC risk.