Healthy Breasts 1: Your Bra

Are Bras Really Necessary for Healthy Breasts?

For many women, putting on a bra is such an automatic part of getting dressed that we rarely stop to ask what effect it actually has on the body.

Bras can provide comfort and support, particularly during exercise or for women with larger breasts. But does wearing one prevent sagging? Does the breast become dependent on external support? And is it healthy to wear a tight bra all day?

French sports scientist Jean-Denis Rouillon attracted considerable attention after studying the effects of bra wearing over many years. His observations suggested that, at least among some younger women, routinely wearing a bra did not prevent breast sagging—and that women who stopped wearing one sometimes experienced improvements in breast position and comfort.

These findings are intriguing, but they should not be interpreted as proof that bras are harmful or that every woman would benefit from giving them up. Breast size, age, pregnancy, genetics, weight changes, connective tissue and physical activity all influence breast shape and comfort.

Perhaps the more useful question is not “Are bras good or bad?” but “When does support help the body, and when might we comfortably do without it?”

Can Bras Cause Breast Cancer?

The idea that wearing a bra—particularly a tight or underwired bra—might increase the risk of breast cancer has circulated for decades.

One theory suggests that tight bras compress the breast and interfere with lymphatic drainage, potentially allowing unwanted substances to accumulate in the tissues. This idea sounds plausible enough to have become widely repeated, but plausibility is not the same as scientific evidence.

Research has not established that wearing a bra increases the risk of breast cancer.

A frequently repeated set of statistics once claimed dramatically higher rates of breast cancer among women who wore bras for longer periods each day. These figures have circulated widely online, but they did not come from the kind of rigorous scientific research needed to demonstrate that bras cause breast cancer.

Better-designed research has failed to find a meaningful association between breast cancer risk and wearing a bra, including the age at which women began wearing bras, the number of hours worn each day, cup size or the use of underwire.

Nor is there convincing evidence that ordinary bra wearing blocks lymphatic drainage sufficiently to cause breast cancer. The lymphatic system is an extensive network throughout the body, and the causes of breast cancer are considerably more complex.

This does not mean that comfort and fit are unimportant. A bra that is excessively tight or poorly fitted can cause pressure, chafing, skin irritation, shoulder discomfort and other problems. If taking off your bra at the end of the day brings an enormous sense of relief, it may simply be worth asking whether a different size, style—or less time wearing one—would feel better.

Some of us have always known this – but at last we have actual scientific proof that bras are worse than useless.

As reported here in the Huffington Post  and here in a Franco-English online paper

This is the key bit, though:

Mind you, the upper age of the study was 35, so perhaps this needs a bit more of a long term plan… But in the meantime, I’m not rushing out to buy a piece of useless equipment.