By IANS
London : The size of the hips of a woman may predict if her daughter has the chances of developing breast cancer, researchers said.
If a mother has wide hips then her daughter is seven times more likely to develop breast cancer, said the study that looked into the health of more than 6,000 Finnish women born between 1934 and 1944.
The width of a woman’s hips is directly related to the amount of oestrogen – a hormone produced in the ovary – that she is producing and the amount her unborn baby is exposed to, the researchers said.
David Barker of Southampton University, an internationally renowned medical researcher and others compared the risk of breast cancer in women born to mothers who have wide hips.
They found that a woman’s risk of breast cancer went up by 60 percent if her mother’s hips were more than 11.8 inches (30 cm) across. The risk increased with hip size and with the length of time the baby was in the womb, reported the online edition of Daily Mail.
Babies carried by wider-hipped women for the full 40 weeks of gestation or longer were 3.7 times more likely to develop breast cancer, the researchers reported in the American Journal of Human Biology.
Barker said his findings could lead to the development of a drug that prevents breast cancer in just three years.