Older Women, Weight and Breast Cancer Risk
Specimen from malignant pleural effusion in metastatic breast cancer
Estrogen, that amazing female hormone, is one of the things that makes us uniquely and beautifully women. Unfortunately, if you are an older woman who is overweight, that very estrogen circulating in your body can increase your risk for breast cancer. A study conducted by Women Veterans’ Comprehensive Health Center at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center looked at more than 287,000 post-menopausal women and came to the conclusion that a woman’s weight is directly related to her risk for breast cancer.
How Weight Affects Estrogen
Of the older women surveyed in this study, the ones who were considered overweight had a 10-35% increased risk of breast cancer than their thinner counterparts, and the risk just kept climbing related to the woman’s weight. The reason is that women who are above a healthy weight have more estrogen circulating in their bodies than women at a healthy weight, and these extra hormones are helping to promote tumor growth.
In other studies conducted a few years back, different research indicated that the increased risk for breast cancer in overweight and obese women might have been due to their not getting accurate cancer screening, or because their tumors are perhaps more difficult to detect on mammography due to their extra weight. These theories were disproved in the current study because the researchers took into account how often these women were getting screened and how easy it was to detect the cancer.
Overweight Women at a Much Higher Risk
According to Dr. Karla Kerlikowske, the study’s leader, “the risk of an advanced stage cancer for an obese woman is 56% to 82% higher than for a normal-weight woman.” This data is pretty shocking, and should hopefully provide women who may be bordering on overweight or obese to think long and hard about their diet and exercise habits – especially those who lack any health insurance that covers breast cancer. According to Kerlikowske, adding strength to the idea that the increased estrogen in heavy women is fueling the tumor is the fact that the rate of tumors called “estrogen receptor-positive” (which are spurred on by estrogen) increased across the various weight groups, while ER-negative tumors did not.
Suggestions for Decreasing Your Risk
Whether you are currently young and healthy or a woman who may fall into the higher risk group, you should be looking seriously at ways to decrease your risk of developing breast cancer. For a younger woman, even if you have a terrific gene pool in which your elders have stayed lithe and spy into their 80’s, you shouldn’t assume that you can avoid the allure of Bon Bon’s and the couch potato life as you grow older. Developing healthy habits like eating well and exercising regularly can stay with you for life, and can prevent you from gaining too much weight as your metabolism slows down into older age.
If you are currently a woman in the “older” category and could stand to be at a healthier weight, you do have a bit of work ahead of you but it is completely do-able.
- Find out what types of weight support your health insurance plans offers; you may be able to meet with a nutritionist and develop a specific eating plan that will help you lose weight and develop better eating habits.
- Talk with your regular doctor as well, and see if they can help you in developing an exercise plan that will work around your schedule. Some companies may offer perks along with health insurance plans like a gym membership plan, and now is the time to jump on that offer.
- If you live close enough, consider walking or biking to work every day. Bring your own lunches from home instead of eating out or from the work vending machines. This can significantly lower your overall calorie intake, because you make the decisions about what foods you bring from home.
- Enlist a group of girlfriends to go for walks or jogs every weekend, so you can get some exercise while also maintaining your friendships (also linked to better health in women).
Losing weight to decrease your breast cancer risk is something you should take seriously and act upon as soon as you can, but with the right support from your doctors and loved ones, you can make healthy changes to last a lifetime.
More Information on Breast Cancer Research
Tags: breast cancer, estrogen, health insurance, obesity, overweight, research, women
