TUESDAY, Oct. 25 (HealthDay News) -- Serum cholesterol and the use of lipid-lowering drugs, especially statins, are not associated with a lower or higher risk of breast cancer, according to an analysis of Nurses' Health Study data in the Oct. 24 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
A. Heather Eliassen, Sc.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues assessed the relationship between statins, general lipid-lowering drugs and cholesterol levels with breast cancer in the Nurses' Health Study.
The researchers followed 79,994 women aged 42 to 69 who were originally cancer-free for up to 12 years. They documented 3,177 cases of invasive breast cancer, including 1,727 in statin users. Overall, users of lipid-lowering drugs had a breast cancer risk similar to non-users (0.91 relative risk). The investigators found no link between total, self-reported serum cholesterol levels and breast cancer risk in either pre- or post-menopausal women.
"Overall, these data suggest that serum cholesterol levels and the use of lipid-lowering drugs in general and of statins in particular are not substantially associated with breast cancer risk," the authors write.
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