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Obesity and Risk of Cancer in Postmenopausal Korean Women

Yun-Mi Song, Joohon Sung, Mina Ha

From the Department of Family Medicine, Samsung Medical Center; Center for Clinical Research, Samsung Biomedical Research Institute, SungKyunKwan University School of Medicine; Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Seoul National University; Department of Cancer Epidemiology and Cancer Prevention, National Cancer Center, Seoul; and Department of Preventive Medicine, Dankook University College of Medicine, Cheonan, South Korea

Corresponding author: Mina Ha, MD, MPH, PhD, Department of Preventive Medicine, Dankook University College of Medicine, Cheonan, Chungnam, South Korea, 330-714; e-mail: minaha{at}dku.edu

Purpose To evaluate an association between obesity, measured by body mass index (BMI; kg/m²), and risk of cancer at individual and all sites in postmenopausal women.

Methods A cohort of 170,481 postmenopausal Korean women who were age 40 to 64 years at baseline measurement of BMI was observed prospectively from 1994 to 2003 for cancer incidence. Multivariable adjusted proportional hazard models were used for evaluating the association.

Results Women with a BMI of 30 kg/m² or higher had a 23% higher risk of cancer than women with a BMI between 21.0 and 22.9 kg/m² (hazard ratio = 1.23; 95% CI, 1.08 to 1.41). According to the increase in BMI level, significant positive trends existed in cancers of colon, breast, corpus uteri, and kidney with hazard ratios of 1.05 (95% CI, 1.02 to 1.08), 1.07 (95% CI, 1.05 to 1.10), 1.13 (95% CI, 1.07 to 1.20), and 1.08 (95% CI, 1.02 to 1.15), respectively, for the increase of BMI by 1 kg/m². When the analysis was limited to never-smokers, women with a BMI of 25 kg/m² or higher showed a significantly increased risk of cancers of the colon, breast, corpus uteri, and kidney and leukemia compared with the normal BMI (18.5 to 22.9 kg/m²) group.

Conclusion Although variations exist between the individual cancer sites, obesity was associated with an overall increased risk of cancer in postmenopausal Korean women. To reduce the risk of cancer, active strategies to prevent obesity should be implemented in postmenopausal women.

Supported by Samsung Biomedical Research Institute Grant No. SBRI C-A5-115-1, National Cancer Center Grant No. 0610552-2, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Korea Grant No. 01-PJ1-PG1-01CH10-0007.

The sponsors of the study had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the article.

Authors’ disclosures of potential conflicts of interest and author contributions are found at the end of this article.

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