Can weight gain increase the risk of breast cancer?
Besides skin cancer, breast cancer is women’s most frequent malignous tumors and represents the second leading cause of cancer death among women, after lung cancer. More than 200,000 people are diagnosed and another roughly 40,000 die from it each year, according to the American Cancer Society and globally more than 1.2 million men and women develop breast cancer every year.
The risk of developing breast cancer is very different from country to country and from individual and increase with age. As the appearance of breast cancer is alarmingly increasing, doctors, health care specialists and researchers try to do everything possible to prevent the disease. A list of risk factors has been put together and lately a new question is bothering researchers. Is it possible, that weight gain has to be included to this list?
Some researchers have long suspected that weight in excess may affect breast cancer risk, because fat tissue produces the hormone estrogen, and estrogen plays a role in the growth of some breast cancers. Several studies are made upon this question and thousands of researchers seek the pros and cons of this theory.
In most of the studies that looked at the possible link between weight and breast cancer recurrence, being overweight or obese programs obese significantly increased the risk. It also lowered survival rates and some other studies showed that the risk of recurrence in women who were overweight at diagnosis increased by about a third.
Several other studies have also reported that women who gain weight as adults have a higher risk of breast cancer after menopause compared to women with stable weight and the post-menopausal breast cancer risk doubled for women who gained more than 45 pounds after age 18 relative to women who did not gain weight.
Either ways we look, more study is needed to verify these findings as the exact effect of repeated weight loss and weight gain on breast cancer risk has not been clearly determined. One sad fact is absolutely sure, this type of cancer is unmerciful and is recruiting victims as we speak. As prevention is one of the most secure antidote, each women above 20 years should have the obligation to go breast consults, do a mammography once a year and learn how to examine herself standing before the mirror after a shower or bath.
