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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Use of baseline and updated information on alcohol intake on risk for breast cancer: importance of latency
International Journal of Epidemiology, Online Early 4 April 2008


Alcohol intake has been shown to be associated with an increased risk for breast cancer. In the analysis of longitudinal prospective cohort studies, however, the analysis of repeated measurements of alcohol intake might not be straightforward.

The association between alcohol intake at first measurement (baseline alcohol intake) and breast cancer was positive and approximately linear. When alcohol intake was updated during follow-up, no association was observed between breast cancer and alcohol intake. It is suggested that this difference in results may be attributable to long latency time between alcohol intake and breast cancer occurrence, because a markedly increased risk was estimated on the basis of direct lagging of risk time.

Our results support the hypothesis that baseline alcohol intake is more strongly associated with breast cancer risk than updated intake, and we suggest that this is due to the long latency between alcohol intake and breast cancer.

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