About one in nine women will eventually develop it, and the risk increases with age and when a woman’s mother, sister or daughter has been diagnosed with the disease.
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Among women aged 50 to 74, those without a high risk for breast cancer or dense breast tissue didn’t have an increase in breast cancer deaths if they went for mammography every three years instead of every two years.
Around 14 in 1,000 women in their 50s are expected to develop breast cancer, but that rises to 34 in 1000 for women taking the combined pill, the study suggests.
And those who had been using the combined HRT for 15 or more years had a 3.27 times increased risk, the study found.
But the authors of the latest study said that previous studies could have underestimated the increased risk of breast cancer by up to 60 per cent, the authors added.
A United Kingdom study has found that women who take combination hormone replacement therapy (HRT) are almost three times as like to develop breast cancer. Those taking oestrogen-only HRT did not have an increased risk.
HRT was first developed in the 1940s and was first made available to women in Britain in 1965.
Women ages 50 to 74 with a high risk for breast cancer and dense breasts, who make up less than 1 percent of women that age, should consider getting screened every year, according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
Researchers also found that the increased risk level returns to normal once HRT usage stops.
Oestrogen-only HRT is rarely used as it can increase the risk of womb cancer, but it had no effect on breast cancer rates.
Conducted by German researchers, the study involved 111 women operated for breast cancer and participating in a clinical trial at the University of Marburg in Germany.
In the study, the researchers from the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium and the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network used computer models of breast cancer study data and statistics to analyze the harms and benefits of different intervals of mammograms. The researchers adjusted their findings to take account of factors that could affect the results, such as sociodemographic and medical factors, including symptoms the women were already experiencing at the start of the study, and previous menopausal symptoms.
In devising their models, the researchers updated assumptions that have cast doubt on the relevance of existing breast-cancer risk calculators, which relied on the experiences of women who got an earlier generation of screening mammograms and were more likely to die of breast cancer than is now the case.
“Our whole goal is to tailor breast cancer screening – it’s a concept we’ve tried to promote for many years”, said Karla Kerlikowske, MD, co-first author of the new study and a member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The women were questioned about their expectations of the effects of the therapy at the start of the trial, and then 107 of the women were assessed at three months and 88 were reassessed at two years.
Dr Heather Currie, a spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and chair of the British Menopause Society, said: “Women need clear, evidence-based information to break through the conflicts of opinion and confusion about the menopause”.
‘Expectations can be modified so as to decrease the burden of long-term side-effects and optimise adherence to preventive anti-cancer treatments in breast cancer survivors’.
Hormone therapy is not indicated for all patients: it is only possible when hormone receptors have been identified in tumor cells (approximately 70% of breast cancers). The team also found that higher expectations of side-effects could predict an increase in their occurrence after two years and subsequently, a lower health-related quality of life.
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“To take or not to take HRT, or other treatments for menopausal symptoms, is an individual choice”.
