Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2011 May;127(1):23-31.
doi: 10.1007/s10549-011-1467-5. Epub 2011 Mar 27.

Dairy consumption and risk of breast cancer: a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies

Jia-Yi Dong  1 , Lijun Zhang, Ka He, Li-Qiang Qin
Affiliations
Review

Dairy consumption and risk of breast cancer: a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies

Jia-Yi Dong et al. Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2011 May.

Abstract

Epidemiologic findings are inconsistent regarding risk for breast cancer related to dairy consumption. We performed a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies to examine the association between diary product consumption and risk of breast cancer. A PubMed database search through January 2011 was performed for relevant studies. We included prospective cohort studies that reported relative risks with 95% confidence intervals for the association of dairy consumption and breast cancer risk. A random effects model was used to calculate the summary risk estimates. We identified 18 prospective cohort studies eligible for analysis, involving 24,187 cases and 1,063,471 participants. The summary relative risk of breast cancer for the highest intake of total dairy food compared with the lowest was 0.85 (95% confidence interval: 0.76-0.95), with evidence of heterogeneity (P = 0.01, I (2) = 54.5%). For milk consumption, the summary relative risk was 0.91 (95% confidence interval: 0.80-1.02), and substantial heterogeneity was observed (P = 0.003, I (2) = 59.7%). Subgroup analyses based on limited numbers of studies suggested that the associations were somewhat stronger for low-fat dairy intake than for high-fat dairy intake and for premenopausal women than for postmenopausal women. There was a significant dose-response relationship of total dairy food, but not milk, consumption with breast cancer risk. Little evidence of publication bias was observed. In conclusion, findings of the present meta-analysis indicate that increased consumption of total dairy food, but not milk, may be associated with a reduced risk of breast cancer.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

LinkOut - more resources