These findings are aligned with prior evidence demonstrating that epigenetic signatures in cervical smear samples can identify women who will develop breast cancer with the worst prognoses5 and with observations of a deceleration in the relative epithelial age in the cervical smear samples of premenopausal women with breast cancer and in normal breast tissue from BRCA1 mutation carriers which is reversed by antiprogestins37. Here, BRCA1 is linked to breast carcinoma.