Being overweight before the age of 50 may significantly increase the risk of death from pancreatic cancer, being overweight increases the higher risk of pancreatic cancer, a study has found.
Pancreatic cancer is relatively uncommon, accounting for just over three percent of all new cancer cases. However, it is an extremely deadly type of cancer, In this type of cancer people who suffer from this kind of cancer will survive only for a limited time, with a five-year survival rate of just 8.5 percent, researchers said.
"Pancreatic cancer ra
tes have been steadily increasing since the early 2000s," said Eric J Jacobs, senior scientific director of Epidemiology Research at the American Cancer Society in the US.
"We've been puzzled by that increase because smoking — a major risk factor for pancreatic cancer — is declining," he said in a statement. The people who do smoking much will face pancreatic cancer because the risk of pancreatic cancer is higher in people who smoke.
Most previous studies on the link between weight and pancreatic cancer were based on weight measured in older adulthood, which may be less informative because it could reflect body fat gained too late in life to influence the risk of pancreatic cancer during a typical lifespan, Jacobs said.
Researchers sought to find out if excess weight measured earlier in adulthood might be more strongly linked to pancreatic cancer risk than excess weight measured at older ages.
The team examined data from 963,317 US adults with no history of cancer. All participants reported their weight and height just once, at the start of the study, when some were as young as 30 while others were in their 70s or 80s.
The researchers used this information to calculate body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight relative to height, as an indicator of excess weight.
During the follow-up period, 8,354 participants died of pancreatic cancer. As expected, higher BMI was linked with increased risk of dying of pancreatic cancer, but this increase in risk was largest for BMI assessed at earlier ages.
While the study only had information on deaths from pancreatic cancer, the disease is nearly always fatal, so results are expected to be similar to those for new diagnoses of pancreatic cancer, Jacobs said.
Jacobs said the study results indicate that excess weight could increase the risk of death from pancreatic cancer more than previously believed.
"Our results strongly suggest that to stop and eventually reverse recent increases in pancreatic cancer rates, we will need to do better in preventing excess weight gain in children and younger adults, an achievement which would help prevent many other diseases as well," Jacobs said
