Obesity Contributes to Some Cancers

Cancer is a tricky disease. We know some causes of some cancers and some risk factors for some cancers, but we don’t know enough to cure most of them. What we can do, however, is take what we know and try to reduce the risks we do know of.

It’s not surprising to anyone in the healthcare field to know that unhealthy lifestyle choices, like smoking, drinking too much, not eating well, not exercising enough, and so on, contributes to ill health. Obesity is also something that contributes to disease, and now it’s being found that it could also be contributing to some types of cancer as well.

According to a press release issued by ECCO-the European CanCer Organisation:

At least 124,000 new cancers in 2008 in Europe may have been caused by excess body weight, according to estimates from a new modelling study. The proportion of cases of new cancers attributable to a body mass index of 25kg/m2 or more were highest among women and in central European countries such as the Czech Republic, Latvia, Slovenia and Bulgaria.

The lead researcher pointed out that as smoking rates are dropping and hormone replacement therapy is becoming less common, “it is possible that obesity may become the biggest attributable cause of cancer in women within the next decade.”

The numbers found through the study may actually be lower than they truly are:

• 3.2% of new cancers in men could be attributed to excess weight
• 8.6% of new cancers in women could be attributed to excess weight

The types of cancer attributed to excess weight varied but the most common ones, altogether accounting for 65% of the new cancers, were:

• endometrial cancer
• post-menopausal breast cancer
• colorectal cancer

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Image: MorgueFile.com