title: Is the recent fall in incidence of post-menopausal breast cancer in UK related to changes in use of hormone replacement therapy?
abstract: There has been a substantial decline in the use of female sex hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the United Kingdom, particularly by post-menopausal women, since around 2000-2001. Given what is known of the risk of breast cancer in women receiving HRT, the decline in use should have resulted in a decrease in risk, and incidence rates about 14% lower than expected were predicted for the age group 50-59 in 2005. There has been a recent slowing and reversal of the increasing trends in incidence of breast cancer in the age group 45-64. This is most marked at ages 50-59, where rates since 1999 have been decreasing at 0.8% a year, following a long period of sustained increase. It seems probable that these two events are causally related.
authors.affiliation: Queen Mary University of London, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Cancer Research UK Centre for Epidemiology, Mathematics and Statistics, Charterhouse Square, London EC1M 6BQ, United Kingdom. max.parkin@cancer.org.uk
authors.forename: Donald Maxwell
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Parkin
mesh_terms: D017677:Age Distribution; D017668:Age of Onset; D000368:Aged; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000209:etiology; D015914:Estrogen Replacement Therapy / Q000009:adverse effects / Q000706:statistics & numerical data* / Q000639:trends; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D008875:Middle Aged; D017698:Postmenopause; D006113:United Kingdom / Q000453:epidemiology