A recent study in India has found that women who have had an abortion are 636% more likely to develop breast cancer compared to women with no history of abortion.
The report, published in the Indian Journal of Cancer, suggests that terminating a pregnancy makes the breast’s epithelium tissue more likely to act as a cancer-producing agent.
“It has been suggested that abortions leave the breast epithelium in a proliferative state with an increased susceptibility to carcinogenesis,” it says.
Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences compared three hundred and twenty breast cancer cases at a hospital in New Delhi to an equally number of healthy individuals, which constituted the control group.
“History of abortion was also found to be positively associated with the risk of breast cancer with 6.26 times higher risk in women having a history of abortion,” they said.
“The history of abortions was found to be significantly higher in breast cancer cases as compared to [healthy] controls.”
A recent meta-analysis from Chinaalso found that the overall risk of developing breast cancer among women who had at least one induced abortion was increased by 44 per cent.
The authors of the Chinese review, which has been described as a “real game-changer”, highlighted that their study differed from a 2004 meta-analysis led by Dr. Valerie Beral, which claimed there was no link between breast cancer and abortion.
Her study was strongly criticised by four experts in seven medical journals independently of one another.
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