Lactation Consultant

Just when you think there couldn’t be another benefit to breastfeeding, a conversation with a friend, thankfully, proves you wrong. She was telling me about her mother’s recovery from breast cancer. When I asked if the doctors had any ideas about potential or likely causes, she said that hormone therapy used in treating menopause is suspected, but not yet confirmed, to be the culprit. My 84 year old grandmother recently recovered from breast cancer as well and is convinced that her cancer was caused by the hormone treatment she had been undergoing to control her menopausal symptoms. While this news is very disconcerting and makes us contemplate our own hormone therapies in the form of birth control, I was encouraged by the research my friend shared with me that suggests breastfeeding reduces your risk of breast cancer. While your child-bearing age is also a factor in the risk for breast cancer, the number of children you breastfeed and for how long have been shown to significantly reduce your risk of developing the disease. Breastfeeding inhibits the production of reproductive hormones in your body, therefore discouraging the growth of some types of breast cancers.

Here’s a link to one such study supporting breastfeeding as a factor in reducing the risk for developing breast cancer. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2681548