Being overweight or obese — long implicated in heart disease and diabetes — is now associated with getting at least 13 types of cancer.
By Laurie McGinley Laurie McGinley Reporter covering health and medicine Email Bio Follow April 14 at 9:00 AM Smoking has been the No. 1 preventable cause of cancer for decades and still kills more than 500,000 people a year in the United States. But obesity is poised to take the top spot, as Americans’ waistlines continue to expand while tobacco use plummets.
Compared with people of normal weight, obese patients are more likely to see their cancer come back and have a lower likelihood of survival. Perhaps most alarming, young people, who as a group are heavier than their parents, are developing weight-related malignancies, including colorectal cancer, at earlier ages than previous generations, experts say.
About 7 in 10 Americans are overweight or obese, according to a 2015 article in JAMA Internal Medicine. People are considered overweight if they have a body mass index of 25 to 29, and obese if they have a BMI of 30 or more. Meanwhile, people who are overweight or obese are about twice as likely to develop liver and kidney cancer, and about 1.5 times as likely to develop pancreatic cancer than normal-weight people, according to NIH.
To be eligible for the trial, women must have a BMI of 27 or higher. The study, which will enroll about 3,100 women, will compare Massey’s group — which gets supervised weight loss and health-education materials — with a group that receives only the educational materials. It worked for Folloder. “I used to say that I was hungry all the time but I really wasn’t,” she said. “Now I’m more in tune with my body.”
The study is based on the Diabetes Prevention Program, which showed that people at high risk for Type 2 diabetes can prevent or delay the disease by losing a modest amount of weight through dietary changes and increased physical activity.
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