
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, October 27, 1994                   TAG: 9410280018
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

ABORTION, BREAST RISK LINKED

Among women 45 or younger who have been pregnant at least once, those who had an abortion have a 50 percent greater risk of developing breast cancer, according to a new study.

The research, to be published in next Wednesday's Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found the increased risk even among women who had carried another pregnancy to term, either before or after an elective abortion. In the study of 1,806 white women in Washington state, the risk was highest among those who had had abortions before age 18, after age 30 or during the third month of pregnancy.

Miscarriage, the survey found, did not increase a woman's risk.

It has been known for years that, in general, women who bear children early in life have a reduced risk of breast cancer compared with women who have no children. Dozens of previous studies of the relationship between abortion and breast cancer have produced highly inconsistent results. The researchers stressed that the latest findings are not definitive.

Janet R. Daling and colleagues from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle conclude that their findings ``support the hypothesis'' that abortion affects the risk of breast cancer, and need to be confirmed by more research.

Eugenia Calle, director of analytic epidemiology for the American Cancer Society, said Wednesday that the study ``adds to the growing research on this subject and provides leads for further research. However, at this time the evidence is not strong enough to call induced abortion a risk factor for breast cancer.''

The Seattle researchers looked at the reproductive histories of 845 white women born after 1944 who had been diagnosed with breast cancer between 1983 and 1990. They then compared those results with the histories of 961 other women of the same ages from the same three counties in Washington state. In both groups, the histories were obtained by interviews and thus based on the subjects' recollections rather than examination of medical records.

Among women who had been pregnant, the Hutchinson team found, those who had one or more abortions were approximately 50 percent more likely to have developed breast cancer by age 45. The risk was not affected by the number of abortions or the number of pregnancies a woman had completed; it did vary according to age at the time of abortion and was highest - approximately twice the rate in the non-abortion group - when performed after eight weeks of gestation.

That finding appears to support one theorized mechanism for a relation between abortion and breast cancer. With pregnancy come hormones that cause breast cells to start multiplying; during the second and third trimester, these previously undifferentiated ``stem'' cells begin developing specialized forms for various milk-producing functions. If the pregnancy is terminated in the first trimester, some researchers believe, it might increase the possibility of tumors because breast cancer originates in undifferentiated cells.

by CNB