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Oral Contraceptives & Breast Cancer
TABLE 1-1 Percentage of Women Who Have Ever Used Oral Contraceptives, by Birth Cohort and Marital Status, United States, 1987
Birth Cohort
Age at Interview (years)
All Women (percent)
Ever-married Women (percent)
1935-1939
48-52
46.9
47.9
1940-1944
43-47
67.9
70.7
1945-1949
38-42
80.6
81.9
1950-1954
33-37
80.6
82.7
1955-1959
28-32
79.4
82.9
1960-1964
23-27
78.2
85.4
1965-1969
18-22
49.5
80.4
SOURCE: Data from the 1987 National Health Interview Survey, adaptedfrom D. A. Dawson, "Trends in Use of Oral Contraceptives—Data fromthe 1987 National Health Interview Survey," Family Planning Perspectives 22(1990):169-172.
. Today, 1 in 9 women who live long enough develops the disease sometime in her life, and 1 in 18 can expect to die from it. Furthermore, approximately two-thirds of women over the age of 70 are reported to have abnormal cellular proliferation in their breast tissue (Kramer and Rush, 1973).
FIGURE 1-1 Estimates of cancer among American women, 1991. SOURCE: C. C. Boring, T. S. Squires, and T. Tong. “Cancer Statistics, 1991,” A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 41(1991):19-51. Reproduced with permission of the American Cancer Society.
