When Toronto oncologist Pamela Goodwin first began searching for a link between obesity and breast cancer in the early 1990s, she was hunting out on the wilderness edge of her specialty.But as the ranks of the overweight grew in the ensuing three decades, so has the evidence that obesity is strongly associated with more than a dozen forms of the disease.“At this point, I think the oncology community believes there’s a link between obesity and (the) risk for most cancers,” says Goodwin, head of the breast cancer program at Mount Sinai Hospital.“And they believe that obesity contributes to the outcomes for many cancers.”Indeed, the cancer risks stemming from excess weight likely rival those of obesity related heart attacks, according to several large studies looking at the connection.And an influential panel of the St. Gallen International Breast Cancer Conference — a semi-annual meeting that helps determine best practices for the disease around the globe — recommended weight loss and exercise programs be prescribed as part of a care package.Despite massive public health efforts, obesity rates continued their relentless climb among U.S. adults in the past decade, a study published this spring revealed. (Canadian rates, though likely less severe on the upper end of the scale, typically follow those south of the border, Goodwin says.)Goodwin, whose interest was piqued by a small number of intriguing but little-noted studies she read while doing a fellowship at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital a quarter-century ago, says most physicians and researchers dismissed a potential link at the time.And Dr. Jennifer Ligibel, a Harvard University breast cancer physician and scientist, says it remained poorly understood until very recently.“It has gained much broader attention in the last few years,” says Ligibel, who leads an American Society for Clinical Oncology panel that promotes awareness of the obesity link ...
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