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At
last, a health benefit to having children late in life — it
seems to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer, U.S. researchers
reported. They found that women who had their last children
after
the age of 35 had a 58 percent lower
risk
of ovarian cancer compared with women who had never had
a child.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters), Wed July 14, 2004
Women who had children earlier
in life also had a lower risk, but it was less dramatic --
16 percent for women whose children
were born before age 25, for example, and 45 percent for women
whose children were born before age 30.
Women who had four
or more children had a 64 percent lower risk than women who
had never given birth, Malcolm Pike of the University of Southern
California and colleagues reported in Wednesday's issue of
the journal Fertility & Sterility.
Pike's team interviewed
477 ovarian cancer patients and 660 healthy women of similar
race, ethnicity, age, and neighborhood.
The women who had babies
later in life were much less likely to have had ovarian cancer,
they found.
"We asked was it true for women who only had one
baby, was it true for women who only had two babies," Pike
said in a telephone interview. The number of children did not
matter.
"We found it was pretty consistent."
Earlier studies
have shown that having children late in life also protects
against cancer of the endometrium -- the lining of the uterus,
said Pike.
He believes that the surge in the hormone progesterone
that is seen in pregnancy may be a factor in both cancers.
"This
level of progestins might very well be fatal to early disease," Pike
said.
In addition, the uterus is "cleaned out" with birth and the delivery of the placenta,
perhaps taking away aging cells that are more likely to become cancerous, Pike
said.
Pike believes the findings could have implications for preventing ovarian
cancer, which, while rare, is deadly. "If you could work this out you could possibly
do some prevention," he said.
Dr. Robert Schenken, president-elect of the American
Society for Reproductive Medicine, which publishes the journal, agrees.
"The
next challenge is to map out the mechanism of the last birth's effect on the
ovaries. It would be a major advance in cancer prevention if, as the authors
suggest, these findings lead to the development of a chemoprevention approach
for women at high risk for ovarian cancer," he said in a statement.
© Reuters
2004
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