Women With Schizophrenia May Be at Greater Risk of Breast Cancer, Meta-Analysis Finds

Women with schizophrenia may be at a 30% higher risk of breast cancer than women without schizophrenia, according to a meta-analysis publishedtoday inJAMA Psychiatry.“Because breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, affecting 1 in 9 women during their lifetime, our findings highlight that intensive prevention and treatment against breast cancer are warranted for women with schizophrenia,” wrote study authors Chuanjun Zhuo, M.D., Ph.D., of Tianjin Me dical University in China and Patrick Todd Triplett, M.D., of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.Zhuo and Triplett conducted a systematic search of PubMed and EMBASE databases; twelve cohort studies that included 125,760 women were included in the meta-analysis. The number of women with schizophrenia included in each study varied from 1,388 to 46,447, and the number of the breast cancer cases ranged from 42 to 1,042.The meta-analysis revealed that schizophrenia was associated with a significantly increased risk of breast cancer incidence in women (standardized incidence ratio, 1.31); however, there were significant differences between the studies included in the meta-analysis.“Future studies are needed to determine the association between schizophrenia and the different pathologic subtypes of breast cancer as well as whether the association may be affected by the woman’s age at breast cancer onset, antipsychotic medications used, and the cancer subtype,” Zhuo and T riplett wrote.Despite the limitations of the meta...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: antipsychotics breast cancer cancer prevention cancer treatment Chuanjun Zhuo JAMA Psychiatry meta-analysis Patrick Todd Triplett Philip Bialer prolactin schizophrenia Source Type: research