(Oct. 26) -- When a team of researchers took a new look at a decades-old study of pregnant women, they came away with a surprise finding: The size and shape of a woman's pelvis may predict her daughter's risk of getting breast cancer.

What does their conclusion mean? "Imagine if we could predict whether a baby would grow up to develop breast cancer the moment she was born. Now imagine if we could make this prediction before she had even been conceived," one of the researchers, Kent L. Thornburg, wrote in the Daily Beast.

Thornburg, of Oregon Health & Science University, specializes in tracing the origins of diseases that appear in adulthood. He and his fellow researchers took a fresh look at a study of 6,000 pregnant women in Finland conducted in 1934-1944. They went on to investigate how many of the women gave birth to daughters who developed breast cancer. Of the 6,000 women in the study, about 300 had daughters who got cancer.

The mothers' pelvises were measured as part of the study. Thornburg and his colleagues found that women with pelvises wider than 12 inches carried a cancer risk 1.6 times higher than those with narrower ones. They also found that the roundness of a woman's pelvis was linked to cancer risk in her daughters.

For more on the study, read Thornburg's full Daily Beast post.