Obesity plays a much larger role in breast cancer development as per a study, published on October 15 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, approximately 40 per cent of hormone-positive breast cancers in postmenopausal women may be linked to excess body fat. This is more than previous estimates that linked excess weight to 1 in 10 breast cancer cases, based on measures of women’s body-mass index (BMI), researchers said. The impact of obesity on breast cancer risk likely has been underestimated because BMI isn’t a very accurate measure of body fat, the researchers argued.
“The findings of this study shows the importance of considering more accurate measures of body fat than BMI to estimate the cancer burden attributable to obesity in postmenopausal breast cancer,” concluded the research team led by Veronica Davila-Batista, an associate professor of epidemiology with the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain. For this study, researchers compared BMI with a different measure of body fat called the CUN-BAE, an equation which accounts for gender and age in BMI measurements. The two measures were used to weigh 1,022 older Spanish women with breast cancer and another 1,143 matched women who didn’t have cancer.
About 23 per cent of breast cancer cases were associated with excess body weight as measured by BMI, researchers found. However, about 38 per cent of breast cancers were linked to excess fat as measured by the CUN-BAE, results show. These d.