ArticleCancer medicine2025
Does Asthma Affect the Risk of Developing Breast Cancer?
Article in Cancer medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe role of the immune system in cancer defense is likely underappreciated. While there has been longstanding interest in the role of atopic diseases in cancer, only a few studies have tested this hypothesis.
methodsWe analyzed data from 202,055 women participating in the Nurses' Health Study (NHS) and the Nurses' Health Study II (NHS II) to explore whether asthma is associated with breast cancer. We used Cox proportional hazards models to link physician-diagnosed asthma with subsequent incidence of breast cancer.
resultsAcross the two cohorts, we identified 18,403 cases of physician-diagnosed asthma. During 4,393,760 person-years of follow-up, 11,096 incident cases of breast cancer were diagnosed. In NHS, women with asthma had a covariate-adjusted hazard ratio of 0.92 (95% CI: 0.86-0.99) to develop breast cancer compared to women without asthma; the respective HR in NHS II was 0.93 (0.84-1.03), and 0.92 (0.87-0.98) in the pooled analysis. Among never-smokers, the HR for breast cancer was 0.91 (0.81-1.02) in NHS, 0.81 (0.70-0.93) in NHS II, and 0.86 (0.77-0.97) combined. In two large prospective cohorts of women, participants with asthma had a somewhat lower risk of breast cancer. An active immune system may provide protection from breast cancer.
conclusionsIn these longitudinal studies, women with asthma had a somewhat lower risk of breast cancer. This association was most pronounced among never smokers. An active immune system may provide protection from breast cancer.
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.