EXCLUSIVE: Obese British men TWICE as likely to develop bowel cancer due to weight

WE ALL know carrying extra weight can be bad for your health but is the general public aware there is a link between obesity and cancer?

 

There is a direct link between having cancer and being obese

 

Cancer is a scary word and thousands of us are affected by the disease every year - be it personally or watching a loved one battle it. 

But there is a sure-fire way of making sure you've got a fighting chance of living a healthy life and not increasing your risk of cancer: keeping a stable, healthy weight. 

 

There is a direct link between being obese and having cancer, as a bariatric surgeon exclusively revealed to NewsNewsBlog.blogspot.com. It comes just weeks after the Food Standards Agency revealed toast and chips could bring on cancer. 

Professor David Kerrigan is the CEO at Phoenix Health, a weight loss clinic, and explained how being overweight - which is having a body mass index (BMI) of over 30 - can impact upon your life. 

What is the link between obesity and cancer? 

DK: The link between obesity and cancer was recognised back in the 1980’s when researchers noted that not only were older women 30 per cent more likely to get breast cancer if they were obese, but that their long-term survival after cancer treatment was significantly worse than that of lean breast cancer victims.

 

Professor David Kerrigan has revealed all to NewsNewsBlog.blogspot.com

 

It’s since become clear that obesity increases the risk of developing a wide range of common cancers (particularly women’s cancers) including some of the most dangerous and difficult to treat malignancies like pancreatic, liver and gullet cancer.

Obesity triggers pathways that promote cancer development, raising levels of hormones like oestrogen and insulin that can stimulate some cancers to grow faster, but fat cells themselves also produce chemicals called adipokines that can affect cell growth and stimulate chronic inflammation, a condition that’s been linked to cancer development for over 100 years. 

Are you at risk if you're just carrying a little extra weight? 

Even fairly small increases in weight by just a few BMI points can increase the risk of certain cancers, but it is those at the most severe end of the obesity spectrum who are at the greatest risk.

• Overweight = BMI 25-30
• Obese = BMI 30+
• The cancer risk stats mainly apply to obese patients
• Unless we intervene with more effective treatments, by 2050, this is predicted to rise to 60 per cent of all men and 50 per cent of women (Foresight report 2007).

How long do you have to be overweight or obese for the risks to be increased? 

DK: Good question – we don’t know the answer to this.  Cancers often develop very gradually in the beginning and many takes years to show themselves, so it makes sense to think that the longer you expose your body to the harmful effects of obesity the greater the chance that cancer will eventually develop.

Is there a specific type of cancer you're at risk of developing if you're overweight?  

DK: You are 30 per cent more likely to develop post-menopausal breast cancer and for men (not women), 50 per cent more likely to develop colorectal (large bowel) cancer if you are obese.

One in three uterine cancers in the UK (cancer of the womb) are though to be directly due to obesity and for every five BMI points racked up above BMI 23, the risk of uterine cancer goes up by 60 per cent.

Liver cancer is strongly associated with obesity too.

 

Obesity triggers pathways that promote cancer development, it's been revealed

 

Is it like diabetes, where if you lose weight the condition can be eliminated? 

DK: That’s a really interesting but tricky question to answer. The evidence from large population studies that obesity increases the risk of developing a wide range of cancers is pretty overwhelming, so it makes sense to conclude that losing weight should lower your risk of cancer starting.

Once certain cancers have developed, we know that obese cancer patients don’t do as well after cancer treatment, with higher rates of both cancer recurrence and death from cancer.  

A large study of overweight American breast cancer patients showed that if they could lose even a fairly modest amount of weight after diagnosis, survival appeared to be better than in those who stayed obese, but there isn’t a huge amount research that has looked into this to date.  We don’t yet know how more powerful weight loss treatments such as drugs or surgery might help improve long-term cancer survival.

  

Even fairly small increases in weight can increase the risk of certain cancers

 

What's the answer to saving lives when it comes to obesity the link to cancer? 

Greater awareness of the link between cancer and obesity, not just amongst the public but also amongst doctors, many of whom are shocked when the hard facts are explained to them (data that has been available from reliable sources such as Cancer Research UK for years).

If people understood that obesity isn’t just a problem about how you look, but a disease that causes damage to so many different internal body organs maybe we’d all be a bit more proactive about doing something about it.

That would involve people taking more personal responsibility for not letting those extra few pounds gradually turn into an extra stone or two I the knowledge that if you don’t succeed you are literally putting your life at risk.  

For those who are already so far down the pathway to severe obesity, we need to bite the bullet and offer them rapid access to treatments that will actually work for them (including bariatric surgery) instead of wasting precious time, resource and NHS funds treating them in with the same kinds of low level treatments that can be successful in preventing obesity or treating mild cases.

it’s like treating someone with pneumonia with cough medicine first instead of giving them the powerful antibiotics they need straight away.