Lower Risk for Obese Young Women.

PositionBREAST CANCER

Young women with high body fat have a decreased chance of developing breast cancer before menopause, indicates findings published in the journal JAMA Oncology.

"It is well known that women who gain weight, particularly after menopause, carry an increased risk of postmenopausal breast cancer," says Dale Sandler, cosenior author and head of the Epidemiology Branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. "Our finding that breast cancer risk is not increased in obese premenopausal women and, in fact decreases, points to the possibility that different biologic mechanisms are responsible for causing breast cancer in younger women."

Sandler indicates that, since the development of breast cancer is relatively rare before menopause, researchers previously found it difficult to evaluate fully risk factors in a single study. She adds that previous studies suggest risk factors for breast cancer in younger women may not be the same as in older women.

To understand breast cancer risk in women who have not gone through menopause, Sandler and other researchers formed the Premenopausal Breast Cancer Collaborative Group. The international team pooled data from 19 different studies, comprising 758,-592...

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