Longitudinal body mass index and cancer risk: a cohort study of 2.6 million Catalan adults

A new study by researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the University Institute for Primary Health Care Research Jordi Gol i Gurina (IDIAPJGol), Spain, in collaboration with the University of Regensburg, Germany, provides new evidence that life-course adiposity-related exposures are associated with more types of cancer than currently thought. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications.

The teams of researchers collected longitudinal measurements of body mass index for more than 2.6 million Catalan adults. During a median follow-up period of 9 years, 225 396 of the participants were diagnosed with any of 26 cancer types of interest.

This study shows that longer duration of, greater degree of, and younger age of onset of overweight and obesity during early adulthood (ages 18–40 years) are positively associated with the risk of developing 18 cancer types, including leukaemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and, in never-smokers, head and neck cancer and bladder cancer, which are not yet considered as obesity-related cancers in the literature. The study also adds to the increasing evidence that overweight and obesity probably contribute to a higher cancer burden than the current literature suggests.

This work is part of a broader initiative led by scientists of the Nutrition and Metabolism Branch at IARC to investigate life-course adiposity and other novel indicators of adiposity, which go beyond a single body mass index measurement to improve the understanding of the role of adiposity in cancer development.

Recalde M, Pistillo A, Davila-Batista V, Leitzmann M, Romieu I, Viallon V, et al.
Longitudinal body mass index and cancer risk: a cohort study of 2.6 million Catalan adults
Nat Commun, Published online 30 June 2023;
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39282-y