Obesity might cause more breast cancers that previously thought About 40% of hormone-positive breast cancers are linked to excess body fat That’s higher than previous estimates linking obesity to 1 in 10 cases WEDNESDAY, Oct. 16, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Obesity is a more powerful driver of breast cancer than previously thought, a new study suggests. About 40% of hormone-positive breast cancers in postmenopausal women might be linked to excess body fat, researchers reported Oct.
15 in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health . That’s significantly 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 real-world 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 highlight 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.
