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May 1, 2023 — Weight loss surgery has long been known to provide health benefits beyond the pounds lost. According to research, diabetes can go into remission, sleep apnea can improve, and blood pressure can decrease. Now researchers are adding lower cancer risk to the list.
The researchers compared nearly 56,000 obese people who had bariatric surgery to the same number who did not. They tracked the number of people who developed cancer over the next 10 years.
The surgery group had less than half as many cancer cases.
“We found a difference in the incidence of breast, colon, liver and ovarian cancer…with patients in the bariatric surgery group having a lower incidence of these four types of cancers compared to to the non-surgical control group,” Vibhu said. Chittajallu, MD, lead study author and gastroenterology fellow at Cleveland University Hospitals.
Obesity has been linked to multiple serious diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. The obesity epidemic is “one of the most serious health problems in the United States today,” Chittajallu said during an April 27 media preview of research highlights for Digestive Disease Week. 2023.
Obesity is also common. The CDC reports that nearly 42% of American adults suffer from obesity and the rates continue to rise.
Chittajallu and his colleagues identified 55,789 obese people who had the surgery and a control group of others who did not using billing codes in a national database. Their retrospective observational study included people undergoing sleeve gastrectomy, gastric bypass and gastric banding procedures at one of 47 health care organizations nationwide.
Main findings
They found that 4% of the operated group and 8.9% of the non-operated group had developed cancer. The bariatric surgery group had a lower number of new cases for several types of cancer.
Cancer development over 10 years
The researchers found significant declines in four specific cancers linked to obesity: breast cancer, colon cancer, liver cancer and ovarian cancer. Several other cancers were not significantly different between the groups, including kidney, rectum and endometrial cancers.
Why cancer risk goes down after obesity surgery isn’t fully understood, Chittajallu said, but bariatric surgery has been shown to reduce excess inflammation, raise insulin and moderate blood levels. hormone.
| type of cancer | # Cases after surgery | # Cases without surgery |
|---|---|---|
| Breast | 501 | 751 |
| Colon | 201 | 360 |
| Liver | 969 | 2,198 |
| Pancreatic | 54 | 86 |
| Ovary | 130 | 214 |
| Thyroid | 154 | 175 |
“Makes logical sense”
Loren Laine, MD, host of the press conference, called the study “fascinating.”
“Obesity is clearly associated with a number of different cancers and this is very important. So it makes sense that if you lose weight, you reduce that risk,” said Laine, professor of medicine and chief of digestive health at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, CT.
Researchers controlled for risk factors that could also contribute to cancer development, including smoking history, alcohol consumption, heart disease and hormone therapies. Laine added that it was likely that the investigators could not control all the factors because they were limited to the information available in the database.
Unanswered questions
If future research shows that the more weight you lose, the more likely you are to have a reduction in cancer, “that would be fascinating,” Laine said. Moreover, it would be interesting to know if other approaches like weight-loss drugs could also reduce the number of cancers.
“We need more research to understand how bariatric surgery affects cancer risk,” Chittajallu said, “but the significant results from this study suggest this is an exciting avenue for further study.”
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Sources 2/ https://www.webmd.com/obesity/news/20230501/weight-loss-surgery-could-cut-cancer-risk-in-half-over-time The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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