Oral Contraceptives and Hereditary Ovarian Cancer

To the Editor: Narod and colleagues (Aug. 13 issue)¹ suggest that oral-contraceptive therapy reduces the risk of ovarian cancer among women with mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene. However, some possible biases should be considered.First, the characteristics of the 207 women with ovarian cancer and the 161 control women were not similar, in that all of the patients had a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation but only 53 of the 95 women in the control group who were tested were carriers of the same mutations as their sisters. Even if the 66 control women who were not tested for . . .