The potential role of the polymorphism in the CYP17 gene was evaluated in a case-control study with 483 incident breast cancer patients and 482 population controls, all of homogenous Finnish origin. Our data disagree with the earlier suggestions that the minor A2 variant of CYP17 would pose an increased risk for developing advanced breast cancer. In contrast, a tendency of inverse association was found for premenopausal women carrying the A2 allele containing genotypes with a multivariate adjusted odds ratio of 0.58 approaching statistical significance (95% CI, 0.31-1.07). Agreeing with previous observations, the protective effect of later age at menarche (> or =13 years) was mainly limited to women with A1/A1 genotype, although this could only be seen in premenopausal women (odds ratio, 0.34; 95% CI, 0.15-0.76). Similarly, we found a remarkably lower risk for premenopausal women with at least one child (odds ratio, 0.22; 95% CI, 0.07-0.62) to be mainly attributable to the A1/A1 genotype. CYP17 genotypes may thus modify individual breast cancer proneness in certain subpopulations, although they appear not to have any major modifying role in the risk of this malignancy overall. Because these findings are based on relatively small numbers in stratified analysis, they should, however, be interpreted with caution before being confirmed in future studies.