Overweight and obese breast cancer patients are more prone to have recurrences and die earlier than thinner women.
That’s the chief finding of a new study presented at the Eighth European Breast Cancer Conference last week. Researchers with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston found the association between weight and cancer risk held true even though the study required that chemotherapy dosages for the women be adjusted for body weight.
For the study, investigators tracked the health records of 1,909 patients between 1997 and 1999, including participants’ height and weight, whether they experienced cancer relapses and when they died.
About 1.2 percent of the patients were underweight, 32.6 percent normal weight, 32.9 percent overweight and 33.3 percent obese.
Lead researcher Dr. Jennifer Ligibel said the analysis showed obesity and overweight women had higher rates of relapse and earlier death. Although past studies have linked obesity and the development of breast cancer, the new findings are among the first to show a connection between weight and cancer recurrence and survival.
"When you consider that data from 2007-2008 show that 68 percent of U.S. adults aged 20 years and over were overweight or obese, as compared to only 56 percent of the same group in 1998-1994, you can see the way the problem is growing,” said Ligibel. “That is why we think it is a matter of urgency to find out as much about the relationship between obesity and cancer as we can."