Benign breast disease and subsequent breast cancer: English record linkage studies

Background Benign breast disease (BBD) increases the risk of breast cancer, but details of the relationship would benefit from further study in the UK. Methods Analysis of linked statistical abstracts of hospital data, including a cohort of 20 976 women with BBD in an Oxford data set and 89 268 such women in an English national data set. Results Rate ratios (RRs) for breast cancer, comparing BBD and comparison cohorts in these two data sets, were 2.3 (95 % CI: 2.2–2.5) and 3.2 (3.0–3.3), respectively. RRs rose with increasing age at BBD diagnosis and remained elevated for at least 20 years after diagnosis. RRs were particularly high for a relatively small number of cancers occurring in the first few months after BBD diagnosis. Conclusions Our findings accord well with those in other large studies, mostly done in the USA, in showing a sustained long-term cancer risk after BBD. They also demonstrate that known long-term risks of disease can be reliably identified from linked routine administrative hospital statistics. Most other studies omit cancers in the first few months after BBD. Such cases—presumably either misdiagnosed or miscoded—merit further study to determine whether in fact they include diagnoses of cancer that were initially missed