It is increasingly clear that maintaining a healthy weight throughout adulthood is one of the best things women can do to protect themselves against breast cancer.
Findings from a study involving more than 87,000 female nurses show that weight gain during adulthood is a strong risk factor for breast cancer. Researchers also found that weight loss after menopause helped lower breast cancer risk.
Gaining 55 pounds or more after age 18 was associated with a 45% increase in breast cancer risk after menopause over women who maintained a healthy weight throughout their 20s, 30s, and 40s.
The Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School study is not the first to find weight gain during adulthood to be an important risk factor for breast cancer. But it is the first to show that losing weight after menopause can lower breast cancer risk.
The research is published in the July 12 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
“It seems from our findings that it is never too late to reduce breast cancer risk by losing weight,” researcher A. Heather Eliassen, ScD, tells WebMD. “But we all know how hard it is to lose weight. So the best advice that we can give to women is to avoid the weight gain in the first place.”
Read more about the link between weight gain and cancer here