Alcohol consumption and breast cancer risk in younger women according to family history of breast cancer and folate intake

Hyun Ja Kim, Seungyoun Jung, A. Heather Eliassen, Wendy Y. Chen, Walter C. Willett, Eunyoung Cho

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

To evaluate the association between alcohol consumption and breast cancer risk in younger women, overall and by family history of breast cancer and folate intake, we prospectively followed 93,835 US women aged 27.44 years in Nurses' Health Study II who had alcohol consumption data in 1991. Alcohol consumption and folate intake were measured by food frequency questionnaire every 4 years. We documented 2,866 incident cases of invasive breast cancer between 1991 and 2011. Alcohol consumption was not associated with breast cancer risk overall (for intake of ≥10 g/day vs. nondrinking, multivariate hazard ratio = 1.07, 95% confidence interval: 0.94, 1.22). When the association was stratified by family history and folate intake, a positive association between alcohol consumption and breast cancer was found among women with a family history and folate intake less than 400 μg/day (multivariate hazard ratio = 1.82, 95% confidence interval: 1.06, 3.12; P-trend = 0.08). Alcohol consumption was not associated with breast cancer in other categories of family history and folate intake (P-interaction = 0.55). In conclusion, in this population of younger women, higher alcohol consumption was associated with increased risk of breast cancer among those with both a family history of breast cancer and lower folate intake.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)524-531
Number of pages8
JournalAmerican Journal of Epidemiology
Volume186
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Sep 2017

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Author affiliations: Department of Food and Nutrition, Gangneung-Wonju National University, Gangneung-si, Gangwon-do, Republic of Korea (Hyun Ja Kim); Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, School of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland (Seungyoun Jung); Channing Division of Network Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts (A. Heather Eliassen, Wendy Y. Chen, Walter C. Willett, Eunyoung Cho); Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts (A. Heather Eliassen, Walter C. Willett); Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts (Walter C. Willett); Department of Dermatology, Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (Eunyoung Cho); and Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (Eunyoung Cho). This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant CA176726). We thank the staff of Nurses’ Health Study II for their valuable contributions, as well as the following state cancer registries for their help: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. We assume full responsibility for the analyses and interpretation of these data. Conflict of interest: none declared.

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2017.

Keywords

  • Alcohol drinking
  • Breast cancer
  • Family history
  • Folate
  • Women

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