Risk factors for breast cancer in China: similarities and differences with western populations.

The study by Xu et al., reported in this issue of the Archives of Medical Science, is a large original study on breast cancer risk factors in China, a country with low breast cancer incidence [1, 2]. The study shows results from the project of breast cancer prediction (BCPC) in China, aiming to screen breast cancer risk factors among Chinese women and predict individual risk of breast cancer through established risk factors. It is a multicentric hospital-based case-control study, carried out in 14 hospitals in 8 provinces of China, and, from January to July 2008, recruited 416 women aged 30 to 65 years with incident breast cancer and 1156 healthy women.