Weight ‘raises breast cancer risk for older women’

OBESITY significantly increases the chance of older women getting breast cancer, researchers have found.

And the more overweight a woman is, the greater her risk. The study showed those who were morbidly obese had a 58 per cent higher risk of developing an invasive breast tumour than those at a healthy weight.

Doctors have long advised that a healthy diet and regular exercise reduce the risk of cancers of all kinds.

But the new study, for which researchers spent 13 years tracking 67,000 women who had been through the menopause, comes as a stark warning of the extent that putting on weight is linked to breast cancer.

More than 50,000 women in Britain are diagnosed with the disease each year, but the research reinforces fears that the obesity crisis will increase these numbers.

Some 64 per cent of women in the UK will be overweight by 2030, up from 59 per cent today, according to the World Health Organisation. The US doctors who led the new study started tracking post-menopausal women aged 50 to 79 in the mid-1990s.

Over the following 13 years, 3,388 of the participants were diagnosed with breast cancers.

The study showed that even being marginally overweight – with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 25 – was enough to increase the risk of breast cancers by 17 per cent. Those who were classed as obese, with a BMI of more than 30, had an increased risk of 37 per cent. For the morbidly obese, with a BMI of more than 35, the risk was 58 per cent higher.

The authors, from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, wrote in the journal JAMA Oncology: ‘These clinically meaningful findings should motivate programmes for obesity prevention.’

Katie Goates of Breakthrough Breast Cancer said: ‘This builds on what we’ve known for some time, in that being overweight, especially after the menopause, can increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer and the more overweight you are, the more you are at risk.’