Wearing bras—with or without underwire—does not cause or increase the chances of developing breast cancer, says research published by the American Association for Cancer Research in its journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
Lu Chen, who is a researcher at the Public Health Sciences (PHS) Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, says in a statement that concerns have been raised over differences of patterns in wearing bra as one reason why the deadly disease may be much more usual in developed countries as opposed to developing countries.
Epidemiologists Dr. Christopher Li and Dr. Kathleen Malone collaborated with Chen in the study, titled Bra Wearing Not Associated with Breast Cancer Risk: A Population-Based Case–Control Study.
"We decided to look at this question because of the nearly complete lack of prior studies evaluating this question which is of interest to women in general given the public health importance of breast cancer," says Li, who is also a breast cancer expert at PHS Division.
Because wearing bra is a common thing, they decided to address the important issue—but proved otherwise.
"Our study found no evidence that wearing a bra increases a woman's risk for breast cancer. The risk was similar no matter how many hours per day women wore a bra, whether they wore a bra with an underwire, or at what age they first began wearing a bra," says Chen, also a doctoral student at the Department of Epidemiology of the University of Washington School of Public Health.
To conduct the research, the study authors examined over a thousand of postmenopausal women of 55 to 74 years old from the metropolitan area of Seattle-Puget Sound. Of these, 590 women have invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC), 454 have invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) and 469 don’t have breast cancer and served as controls.
The study authors then conducted the in-person interviews and gathered information on the women’s family history, reproductive history and demographics. There was also a series of questions structured to evaluate the lifetime patterns of wearing bra, such as the age of participant when she began wearing bra with or without underwire, the number of hours each day and days each week she wore the bra, the bra’s band and cup size and if she ever changed her patterns in wearing bra at some points in her life.
The results proved one thing: "wearing a bra does not appear to increase the risk for the most common histological types of postmenopausal breast cancer."
The authors also say there was no aspect of bra wearing that was linked to an increased likelihood for either ILC or IDC, which are two of the most common subtypes of breast cancer.
The National Cancer Institute and Susan G. Komen foundation also believe that bras are definitely not one of the factors that increase the risk of breast cancer, according to a study published by said cancer research center.
