Dietary vitamin B2 intake and breast cancer risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: Epidemiological studies assessing the relationship between dietary vitamin B2 and the risk of breast cancer have produced inconsistent results. Thus, we conducted this meta-analysis of epidemiologic studies to evaluate this association.

METHODS: We searched English-language MEDLINE publications and conducted a manual search to screen eligible articles. A random-effect model was used to pool study-specific risk estimates. Egger's linear regression test was also used to detect publication bias in meta-analysis.

RESULTS: In our meta-analysis, ten studies comprising totally 12,268 breast cancer patients were available in the analyses. Pooled relative risk (RR) comparing the highest to the lowest vitamin B2 intake and breast cancer incidence was 0.85 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.76-0.95]. No significant heterogeneity existed across the studies (P = 0.086, I (2) = 40.7%). No publication bias was found. The results of dose-response analysis also showed that an increment of 1 mg/day was inversely related to the risk of breast cancer (RR = 0.94; 95% CI = 0.90-0.99).

CONCLUSIONS: Results from our meta-analysis indicated that dietary vitamin B2 intake is weakly related to the reduced risk of breast cancer. Additional research is also necessary to further explore this association.