Breast cancer prognosis and the sex of the patient's children.

To verify a report that the prognosis of breast cancer was better in women whose first child was male, we analyzed the survival of 233 consecutive breast cancer patients diagnosed in 1969 and 1970 in terms of the sex of the first and last children, and of the number and proportion of males among the first four live births. No association between survival and any index of the sex of children was found. Similar negative findings for both survival and time to first recurrence were found in an independent series of 113 patients.