Excess Body Weight Associated with Higher Incidence of Various Cancers

Excess body weight is associated with development of some common cancers, but questions remain about whether similar associations exist for less common malignancies and whether the associations differ between sexes. Investigators performed a meta-analysis of 221 datasets from prospective studies in which body-mass index at baseline and incident cancer cases were reported during follow-up. The analysis included 282,137 incident cases during more than 133 million person-years of follow-up.

Higher BMI was associated strongly with esophageal adenocarcinoma and renal cancer in both sexes, with thyroid and colon cancers in men, and with endometrial and gallbladder cancers in women. Weaker, but still significant, associations were noted between hig…