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Whoa! Kids are like booze?

Having a first baby in your thirties raises your risk of breast cancer for more than two decades, an overview of research has concluded.

Five years after giving birth mothers are 80 per cent more likely to get breast cancer than childless women of the same age and the risk is higher for those who start families later, it found. They have urged doctors to be alert to the problem in those with young children.

While delaying motherhood appears to increase the short-term risk, mothers still have a lower lifetime risk of breast cancer because childbirth becomes protective against the disease by the ages when most cases occur. The study found that 35 years after giving birth, mothers were 23 per cent less likely to get breast cancer than childless women of the same age.

Childbirth has previously been found to have contradictory effects on breast cancer risk, raising it initially while lowering it in the longer term, but the point where these effects cancelled each other out had been unclear.

Not drinking is dangerous, drinking is dangerous to a different degree, where’s the sweet spot, where’s the lowest total risk?

Babbies work the same way. Actually, near all of life works this way……

8 thoughts on “Whoa! Kids are like booze?”

  1. Have sprogs: breast grows to feed sprogs, more target tissue to potentially transform.

    After having sprogs: summat hormones, DNA methylation and other obscure-through-unknown stuff.

  2. “If we drink we will die
    If we don’t drink we will die” – Taras Bulba

    ‘Five years after giving birth mothers are 80 per cent more likely to get breast cancer than childless women’

    This is sensationalized. Conspicuously absent is NUMBERS. If the incidence changed from one in a million to 1.8 in a million, this assertion would be true, but irrelevant.

  3. Is all this based on mere correlation, or do they have good reason to think that they’ve demonstrated cause?

    After all, umpteen observational studies that have shown the merits of various medical procedures have been shown to be bollocks by properly controlled trials.

    So much so that I wonder whether anyone “curates” a good list of such failures. Does anyone here know?

  4. dearieme, it’s more usually the observational studies that cast doubt on the results of the clinical trials. Plenty of subtle ways to make clinical trials give you the results you want. Harder with a registry.

    Difficult, both logistically and ethically to do a clinical trial on this (randomize women to reproducing and non-reproducing groups, follow for a lifetime).

  5. Correct, dearieme. Without a hypothesis as to cause, it is just noise, a statistical curiousity.

    But this is just standard noise from journalists, the finest of people. We get a million articles a year of similar quality. Yet they demand our respect and worship. As if they are God’s chosen people.

    https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2018/12/11/the-guardians-times-2018-person-of-year-is-persecuted-journalists/

    The poor dears.

    Since they perpetually push the CM agenda, seems to me we need MORE persecution, not less.

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