Bras Don't Cause Breast Cancer, According to New Study

A new study has found that regularly wearing a bra does not increase a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer after menopause, which would be a huge weight off our shoulders except that it literally isn’t.

A study published this week in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention debunks a speculative conclusion that bras interfere with the free flow of lymphatic fluids and thus block the removal of toxins which then go on to create breast cancer. But the new study, conducted by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found that isn’t so.

[Researchers] compared the bra-wearing habits of 469 healthy post-menopausal women with those of more than 1,000 women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, study authors found that “no aspect of bra-wearing” was positively linked to breast-cancer occurrence: not cup-size, not preference for soft-cup vs. underwire, not the age at which bra-wearing was initiated or the duration of daily bra-wearing.

However, the researchers noted that bra-wearing is so ubiquitous among women that they were unable to compare the results against a group of women who have never worn a bra.