Breast Cancer and Weight Gain
Gaining weight after age 20, even if only a pound or two per year, can almost double the risk of developing breast cancer after menopause compared to women who keep their weight stable.
This finding, from a National Cancer Institute (NCI) study, reported on the equivalent of a 30-pound gain over the years for a five-foot, four-inch woman. This extra weight acted as a major risk factor for breast cancer, and was as significant as family history of the disease, the age at which a woman begins to menstruate (the earlier, the higher the risk), or whether or not she has had children and the age at which she gave birth, according to study co-author Regina Ziegler, Ph.D., an NCI epidemiologist.
The NCI research team, working with investigators from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, analyzed information from 72,007 postmenopausal women in NCI’s Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial (PLCO) cohort to arrive at the conclusions.