MWS newsletter February 2024
THANK YOU FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION
We are grateful for your continued support for the Million Women Study. Every participant is important to us. The Million Women Study is the largest study of women’s health in the world and has been running since 1996. Between 1996 and 2001, the study recruited 1.3 million women, aged 50-64, through NHS Breast Screening Centres. Since recruitment, participants have provided information to us on their health and aspects of their lives every 3-5 years. We have also followed our participants’ health status through linkage to their NHS records on hospital admissions, deaths and cancer registration.
STUDY PROGRESS
We are continuing to work on our programme grant, funded by Cancer Research UK, on prevention and risk stratification for cancer. As part of this work, we are investigating whether digital mammography and other routine breast screening data can provide valuable information about a woman’s subsequent risk of breast cancer.
MAKING THE BEST USE OF YOUR DATA
All information about you and your health is kept private. Data from which you cannot be recognised may be shared with other research groups who are doing similar research. Researchers working on other studies can apply to access Million Women Study data, so that they can answer new research questions using data that have already been collected. The researchers must demonstrate that their work will benefit public health and they will only be provided with the information needed to answer their specific question. There is more information about this on our data access and sharing web page.
STUDY PUBLICATIONS
A full list of publications can be found on our website but we have highlighted a number of new reports that have been published since our last newsletter.
Our latest research looked at alcohol and the risk of 20 different cancers. We found that alcohol intake was most strongly associated with higher risks of upper aerodigestive cancers and that alcohol worsens the adverse effect of smoking on these cancers, with ten times higher risk of aero-digestive cancers in women who are heavy smokers and heavy drinkers compared to women who have never smoked and drink 1-2 drinks per week.
Adiposity and risk of oesophageal cancer
We investigated the risk of two types of oesophageal cancer (adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma) in relation to different measures of adiposity. We found that there was robust evidence that greater body mass index (BMI) is associated with an increased risk of adenocarcinoma and a reduced risk of squamous cell carcinoma. The increased risk of adenocarcinoma is likely to be due in part to gastric reflux but further research is needed to understand the lower risk of squamous cell carcinoma.
Our research on risk factors for dementia has shown that sleeping for long periods at night is not associated with long-term dementia risk. Similarly daytime napping is not associated with long-term dementia risk. However, our data suggests that sleeping for short periods at night may lead to a small higher risk of dementia.
Cardiovascular multi-morbidity
We found that the likelihood of having two or more cardiovascular diseases was common. 16% of women in the cohort who were free from cardiovascular disease at the start of the study, now have two or more cardiovascular diseases. The majority of women with one cardiovascular disease eventually develop at least one other.
Download the February 2024 newsletter [PDF].