Obesity Increases Cancer Risk, Study Shows

Cancer specialists say there’s a need to better understand how fat cells fuel cancer growth so they might fight back.

“The cancer picture is a little bit more subtle,” says American Cancer Society epidemiologist Eugenia Calle. The risks of heart disease and diabetes from being obese are much higher, and more immediate because cancer typically develops more slowly than those illnesses, she explains.

According to Calle, fat is known to increase the risk of developing cancers of the colon, breast, uterus, kidney, esophagus, pancreas, gallbladder, liver and top of the stomach.

Fat cells apparently play different roles that can spur different types of cancer growth. Fat is linked to breast cancer in postmenopausal women. While anti-estrogen therapies are common, the fatter a woman is, the harder it is to lower hormone levels, one reason the obese have at least a 50 percent greater chance of dying from breast cancer than lean patients , Calle says.

An overweight woman has twice the risk of developing uterine lining cancer. Study shows the obese have up to triple the risk of kidney cancer. Obese men are 50 percent to twice as likely as lean men to get colon cancer. Then there are organ-by-organ reactions. Calle cites this example, the obese are particularly prone to “gastroesophageal reflux,” frequent heartburn where a backup of stomach acid onto the delicate esophagus eventually can lead to esophageal cancer.