Ovarian cancer risk reduces with each child

Researchers at the Cancer Epidemiology Unit, at the University of Oxford have presented new research at the National Cancer Research Institute conference 2015 which suggests that the more babies a woman has the lower her risk of ovarian cancer.

The results were drawn from analysing the data of over 8000 women with ovarian cancer, comparing women according to the number of children they had had.  They found that women with one child had about a 20% reduction in risk compared to women without children and each additional birth then offered an estimated 8% reduction in the overall risk of ovarian cancer.  This results were even more significant in certain types of cancer (endometrioid and clear cell tumours).

Professor Charlie Swanton, Chair of the conference, said: “We’ve known for some time that the number of children a woman has, and her use of contraception, can influence her risk of ovarian cancer, so this research provides important further detail about different types of the disease… We now need to understand the mechanisms behind these findings to develop some way to extend this lower risk to all women, regardless of how many children they have.”

Read the RCM report here