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Obesity and Cancer Risk
(Friday January 22 2010)
 | Via EurekAlert!, another of the many ways in which excess fat tissue hurts you: "Obesity comes with plenty of health risks, but there's one that's perhaps not so well known: an increased risk of developing cancer, and especially certain types of cancer like liver cancer. Now, a group of researchers [have] confirmed in mice that obesity does indeed act as a 'bona fide tumor promoter.' They also have good evidence to explain how that happens. ... liver cancer is fostered by the chronic inflammatory state that goes with obesity, and two well known inflammatory factors in particular. The findings suggest that anti-inflammatory drugs that have already been taken by millions of people for diseases including rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease may also reduce the risk of cancer in those at high risk due to obesity and perhaps other factors as well ... [Researchers were] able to trace the source of obesity's tumor-promoting effect to a rise in two inflammatory factors known as IL-6 and TNF. Obese mice lacking either the TNF receptor or IL-6 don't show the same rise in liver cancer. Those treatments also led the mice to accumulate less fat in their livers, he said. ... They still get fat, but the distribution of the fat is different. The fat goes to other places, but not to the liver." |
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