ArticleBMC cancer2017
Active smoking and risk of breast cancer in a Danish nurse cohort study.
Article in BMC cancer, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Meta-analysis of smoking and breast cancer risk: by age of smoking initiation.Breast cancer (Tokyo, Japan) · 2025Pooled it
- Associations between maternal smoking around birth and hepatocellular carcinoma: A bidirectional two-sample Mendelian randomization study in East Asian populations.Tobacco induced diseases · 2026Article
- Childhood exposure to second-hand smoke (SHS) and risk of breast cancer in postmenopausal never smokers: the Multiethnic Cohort (MEC) study.Breast cancer research : BCR · 2025Article
- Air Pollutants and Breast Cancer Risk: A Parallel Analysis of Five Large US Prospective Cohorts.American journal of public health · 2025Article
- Air pollution and breast cancer incidence in a United States-wide prospective cohort study: Examining sensitive periods of exposure.Environment international · 2025Article
- Breast cancer awareness among women in the Syrian Coast: a cross-sectional study.Annals of medicine and surgery (2012) · 2023Article
- Smoking history and breast cancer risk by pathological subtype: MCC-Spain study.Tobacco induced diseases · 2023Article
- Burden of breast cancer and attributable risk factors in the North Africa and Middle East region, 1990-2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019.Frontiers in oncology · 2023Article
- The importance of addressing early life environmental exposures in cancer epidemiology.Current epidemiology reports · 2022Article
- Article
- Never-smokers and the fraction of breast cancer attributable to second-hand smoke from parents during childhood: the Norwegian Women and Cancer Study 1991-2018.International journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- Behavioral and Enhanced Perinatal Intervention (B-EPIC): A randomized trial targeting tobacco use among opioid dependent pregnant women.Contemporary clinical trials communications · 2020Article
- Article
- The Association of Modifiable Breast Cancer Risk Factors and Somatic Genomic Alterations in Breast Tumors: The Cancer Genome Atlas Network.Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention : a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, cosponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology · 2020Article
- Factors Affecting Long-Survival of Patients with Breast Cancer by Non-Mixture and Mixture Cure Models Using the Weibull, Log-logistic and Dagum Distributions: A Bayesian Approach.Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention : APJCP · 2020Article
- Design, implementation, and evaluation of an intervention to improve referral to smoking cessation services in breast cancer patients.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2019Article
- Smoking and breast cancer risk by race/ethnicity and oestrogen and progesterone receptor status: the Multiethnic Cohort (MEC) study.International journal of epidemiology · 2019Article
- Alerting the illusion of smoking improves quality of life in Chinese male cancer survivors.Cancer medicine · 2019Article
- Long-term exposure to road traffic noise and incidence of breast cancer: a cohort study.Breast cancer research : BCR · 2018Article
- Water-pipe smoking promotes epithelial-mesenchymal transition and invasion of human breast cancer cells via ERK1/ERK2 pathways.Cancer cell international · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundNo scientific consensus has been reached on whether active tobacco smoking causes breast cancer. We examine the association between active smoking and breast cancer risk in Denmark, which has some of the highest smoking and breast cancer rates in women worldwide.
methodsWe used the data from a nationwide Danish Nurse Cohort on 21,867 female nurses (age > 44 years) who at recruitment in 1993 or 1999 reported information on smoking status, onset, duration, and intensity, as well as breast cancer risk factors. We obtained data on incidence of breast cancer from Danish Cancer Registry until 2013, and used Cox regression models to analyze the association between smoking and breast cancer.
resultsOf 21,831 women (mean age 53.2 years) 1162 developed breast cancer during 15.7 years of follow-up. 33.7% of nurses were current and 30.0% former smokers at cohort baseline. Compared to never smokers, we found increased risk of breast cancer of 18% in ever (hazard ratio and 95% confidence interval: 1.18; 1.04-1.34) and 27% in current (1.27; 1.11-1.46) smokers. We detected a dose-response relationship with smoking intensity with the highest breast cancer risk in women smoking >15 g/day (1.31; 1.11-1.56) or >20 pack-years (1.32; 1.12-1.55). Parous women who smoked heavily (>10 pack-years) before first childbirth had the highest risk of breast cancer (1.58; 1.20-2.10). Association between smoking and breast cancer was not modified by menopausal status, obesity, alcohol or hormone therapy use, and seemed to be limited to the estrogen receptor positive breast cancer subtype.
conclusionsActive smoking increases risk of breast cancer, with smoking before first birth being the most relevant exposure window.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.