Think Pinker

Big babies – there’s been a lot of different studies done on big babies but it seems that this recent one might set off alarm bills relating to breast cancer. According to WebMD it seems that women who were born bigger have a higher risk of developing breast cancer. This is especially true when it comes to length.

If you weighed more than 8.8 lbs at birth then you have a 12% increased risk of developing breast cancer and if you were 20 inches or longer you have a 17% increased risk compared to those babies who were 19.29 inches.

What does all this mean? Well for starters it’s important not to panic. There are all kinds of studies and if we worried about everyone we’d drive ourselves crazy. Currently there won’t be any changes to screening processes if you were a higher birth rate. However, one day it may be used to predict risk and it could change the way we do screening.

This wasn’t a small study by no means, with more than 600,000 women, 22,000 cases of breast cancer, and 32 studies incorporated. Back in the 1990s Harvard researchers speculated that breast cancer actually originated in the womb. This breast cancer link could tie things together.

Hormones have always been considered a risk factor in breast cancer, so perhaps it’s more about when the hormones begin to affect risk. More research is certainly needed to see if there really is a hormonal link.

Debbie Saslow, PhD, director of breast and gynecologic cancer at the American Cancer Society stresses that you should not become concerned if you were a heavier baby. It will be some time before we really know what it means.