Losing weight can help lower risk of breast cancer, study says
Women can lower their risk of breast cancer by losing weight, particularly after menopause, says a study that's the first to focus on shedding fat as a method to protect against the deadly disease.
The researchers found that breast cancer may occur in about one in seven women because of the weight they gain as adults.
The risks rose to one in four among weight gainers who never used hormone replacement therapy, the study said.
``Weight is one of the few breast cancer risk factors that women can do something about," said lead author Heather Eliassen. ``Our study suggests it's never too late to lose weight to reduce breast cancer risk. The best advice would be to avoid gaining it in the first place."
Keeping a healthy weight has been linked to lower risks of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other heart-related disorders. This is the first research to show that staying thin can also protect against breast cancer, said Eliassen, an instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School.
Eliassen's study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
About 200,000 Americans will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, according to the American Cancer Society. It's the most common cancer in women and the second leading killer after lung cancer, killing about 41,000 annually.
The increased risk came even from adding as little as 5 pounds, the study found, and rose in proportion with the scale. The good news was that losing weight appeared to be protective.
The researchers tracked the weight changes of 87,000 women who enrolled in the Nurses Health study starting in 1976, and compared the information to the number who developed invasive breast cancer in the next 24 to 26 years. In all, 4,393 cases of breast cancer were documented.
Those who gained 55 pounds since their 18th birthdays were 45 percent more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer than those who stayed the same weight.
Women who lost 20 pounds after menopause and kept it off, however, cut their risk of cancer 57 percent compared with those who maintained their same weight, the researchers said.
