Fifteen-Year Study Identifies BMI as a Risk Factor for Ten Cancers

Higher BMI increased individuals’ risks for 10 common cancers, according to results of a population-based cohort study conducted in the United Kingdom.

More than 12,000 cases of these malignancies each year in the UK can be attributed to patients being overweight or obese, and nearly 4,000 more of these cancers could occur each year if the average BMI of the country’s population continues to increase, results showed.

“The number of people who are overweight or obese is rapidly increasing, both in the UK and worldwide,” researcher Krishnan Bhaskaran, PhD, a National Institute for Health Research postdoctoral fellow at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said in a press release. “It is well recognized that this is likely to cause more diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Our results show that if these trends continue, we can also expect to see substantially more cancers as a result.”

Bhaskaran and colleagues collected data from the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink, which contains primary care records from about 9% of the country’s population. Researchers used the data — which include information about specialist referrals, hospital admissions and diagnoses made in secondary care — to assess the associations between BMI and 22 common cancers.

Read the report here: http://bit.ly/1yACubh

Source: Healio