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News18
3 days ago
- Health
- News18
Can Losing Weight Reduce The Risk Of Breast Cancer After Menopause?
For postmenopausal women, maintaining a healthy weight through sustainable lifestyle changes is one of the most effective and accessible strategies for reducing breast cancer risk. Breast cancer has now become the most common cancer among Indian women, rising from fourth place in the 1990s to the first place today. The most commonly affected age group is between 40 and 70 years, which is why screening mammography is recommended starting at age 40. Mounting scientific evidence suggests that postmenopausal women who lose weight may significantly reduce their risk of breast cancer, offering a powerful preventive strategy through lifestyle modification. Dr. Namrata Singal Sawant, Director and Senior Breast & Women's Imaging Consultant Radiologist, Vcare Imaging Diagnostic Center, Mumbai, shares all you need to know: Key Research Findings Women's Health Initiative Observational Study: Women who lost at least 5% of their body weight during the follow-up period had a lower risk of invasive breast cancer compared to those whose weight remained stable, according to the National Cancer Institute. Comprehensive Research Evidence: Major studies published in Cancer journal confirm that postmenopausal women who lose weight have a lower risk of breast cancer than those with stable weight. Adult Weight Change Studies: Research published in JAMA found that weight loss after menopause is associated with a decreased risk of breast cancer. Biological Mechanisms Behind Protection Reduced Estrogen Production: After menopause, fat tissue becomes the primary source of estrogen. Weight loss decreases fat tissue, resulting in lower circulating estrogen levels, which can reduce hormone-sensitive breast cancer risk. Decreased Inflammation: Obesity leads to chronic inflammation, which may promote cancer development. Weight loss helps reduce inflammatory markers. Improved Insulin Sensitivity: Excess weight contributes to insulin resistance. Weight loss improves insulin function, creating a less favorable environment for cancer growth. Hormonal Balance Restoration: Weight loss also normalizes hormones beyond estrogen, such as leptin and adiponectin, both of which influence cancer risk. Optimal Weight Loss Targets Maximum Benefit: Losing 10–15% of body weight provides the greatest protective effect against breast cancer. Modest Benefit: Even a 5–10% reduction in body weight can significantly lower risk. Maintenance is Key: Sustaining weight loss over time is essential for continued risk reduction. Safe and Effective Approaches Diet: Your First Line of Defense Foods to Include: Cruciferous vegetables (e.g., broccoli, cauliflower) A balanced, diverse diet Fatty fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids Colorful, antioxidant-rich fruits Fiber-rich whole grains (especially millets) Foods to Limit: Processed meats Refined sugars Ultra-processed foods Regular Physical Activity Regular exercise can reduce breast cancer risk by 10–20% compared to a sedentary lifestyle. Combine cardio with strength training Choose enjoyable activities for sustainability Gradual Approach Target a weight loss of 1–2 pounds (0.5–1 kg) per week for lasting results Avoid crash diets, which often lead to weight regain and health issues Professional Guidance is Recommended Individual Assessment: Consult healthcare providers to assess personal risk factors and create a tailored plan. Medical Monitoring: Regular check-ups help track progress and maintain safety. top videos View all Comprehensive Approach: Underlying health conditions can be managed more effectively with medical supervision. In conclusion, for postmenopausal women, maintaining a healthy weight through sustainable lifestyle changes is one of the most effective and accessible strategies for reducing breast cancer risk. view comments Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: July 27, 2025, 07:22 IST News lifestyle » health-and-fitness Can Losing Weight Reduce The Risk Of Breast Cancer After Menopause? Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
NZ Herald
7 days ago
- Health
- NZ Herald
Many lung cancers are now in non-smokers. Scientists want to know why
'My family needs me,' she recalled thinking. Chen's case represents a confounding reality for doctors who study and treat lung cancer, the deadliest cancer in the United States. The disease's incidence and death rates have dropped over the last few decades, thanks largely to a decline in cigarette use, but lung cancers unrelated to smoking have persisted. The thinking used to be that smoking was 'almost the only cause of lung cancer', said Dr Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. However, worldwide roughly 10% to 25% of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50% or more. These cancers are increasingly drawing the attention of researchers like Landi, who are studying the role that environmental exposures, genetic mutations, or other risk factors might play. They have already found some early hints, including a clear link to air pollution. Physicians are also testing new approaches to better detect lung cancer in non-smokers. They are trying to understand why it is more prevalent: in people of Asian ancestry; in women; and why it is being seen among younger people. 'We all still think about the Marlboro man as what lung cancer looks like,' said Dr Heather Wakelee, chief of oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In many cases, though, that's no longer true. 'We're just baffled as to why,' she said. Looking for Clues Many lung cancers in non-smokers have no known cause and are discovered only by chance. That was the case for Sandra Liu, 59, who lives in New Jersey. Liu was diagnosed this year with adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer among non-smokers. Doctors found the mass after she had a full-body check-up during a visit to China — a process popular with some Chinese expatriates visiting the country that includes a chest scan. 'I would have never thought to go for a CT,' she said, noting she had no major symptoms and never smoked. Scientists are starting to see that the biology of cancer in non-smokers like Liu differs from cancers seen in people with a smoking history — and may require different strategies for prevention and detection. One large study, called 'Sherlock Lung' and led by Landi and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, is looking at the mutational signatures, or patterns of mutations across the cancer genomes, of 871 non-smokers with lung cancer from around the world. Their latest findings, published in Nature this month, showed that certain mutations, or changes to DNA, were much more common in people who lived in areas with high amounts of air pollution — for example, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Uzbekistan. More pollution was linked to more mutations. The study did not include data from India, considered to have the highest levels of outdoor pollution. The researchers didn't just find that pollution may directly damage DNA. They also saw signs that pollution causes cells to divide more rapidly, which further increases the likelihood of cancer. Studies have also shown that people who don't smoke but have a family history of lung cancer, such as Chen and Liu — both of Liu's grandfathers had the disease — are at increased risk. This could be because of shared genetics, a common environment or both, said Dr Jae Kim, chief of thoracic surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, California. And scientists know that non-smokers with lung cancer are more likely than people who smoked to have certain kinds of 'driver' mutations, changes to the genome that can cause cancer and drive its spread, Kim said. In contrast, people who smoke tend to accumulate many mutations over time that can eventually lead to cancer. This difference in the type of mutations may be one reason why lung cancer among people under-50 is more prevalent among nonsmokers than smokers. Leah Phillips at her home in Peewee Valley, Kentucky. Photo / Jon Cherry, the New York Times There are probably other factors, too, including exposure to radon, asbestos and possibly aristolochic acid, a compound once common in traditional Chinese medicine. Landi's research linked the compound to lung cancer mutations among Taiwanese patients. Taiwan banned products containing it in 2003. Studies from Asia have also suggested second-hand smoke, fumes from cooking oils, and a history of tuberculosis or other lung disease as possible culprits. However, these potential contributors are less common in the US, where Asian American women who don't smoke are still nearly twice as likely as other women to be diagnosed with the disease, said Scarlett Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. To understand what's driving the disparity in the US, Gomez, Wakelee and colleagues at other Northern California institutions are now studying the relationships among genes, environmental contaminants and lung cancer in Asian American non-smoking women. 'Ultimately, we want to be able to come up with actionable risk factors, just like we do for breast cancer and colorectal cancer,' Gomez said. Revisiting Screening Guidance Studies like Gomez's may help address the question of who should be screened for lung cancer. In the US, routine screening is recommended only for people aged 50 to 80 who smoked at least the equivalent of one pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years. Because of that, lung cancer in non-smokers is often not caught until it's advanced, said Dr Elaine Shum, an oncologist at NYU Langone Health. That can have devastating consequences for patients like Chen, who is still undergoing treatment after a third metastasis of her cancer. Shum and others are now exploring whether screening should be expanded. In Taiwan, a nationwide trial tested the effectiveness of CT scans in people aged 55 to 75 who never smoked but had one other risk factor. Doctors detected cancer in 2.6% of patients — enough that Taiwan now offers routine screening for non-smokers with a family history of lung cancer. Shum and colleagues recently ran a similar pilot study among women of Asian ancestry who were 40 to 74 and had never smoked. In preliminary results from about 200 patients, they found invasive cancer at comparable rates to the Taiwan study. Data from the full set of 1000 patients who were screened is forthcoming. Still, it would take far more research to determine who in the US, if anyone, would benefit from broader screening and whether it could meaningfully reduce lung cancer deaths. Screening more people can lead to more false positives, which may mean patients get biopsies and other interventions they don't need. And some cancers doctors find are so slow growing that they may never cause harm, said Dr Natalie Lui, a thoracic surgeon at the Stanford University School of Medicine. 'What if we're taking out all these tiny lung cancers that would not have been life-threatening?' Lui said. On the flip side, she thinks of the patients she regularly sees who have aggressive or advanced lung cancers but never smoked. 'If there was screening, we could save their life,' Lui said. The good news is that survival with advanced cancers has improved with newer therapies that effectively keep the disease at bay for years in many patients. Such treatments have benefited Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Kentucky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. 'Go home and get your affairs in order,' Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13, and 14. 'I'm not leaving my kids,' Phillips thought. After getting a second opinion, she started taking a drug that targets one of the driver mutations in lung cancer. She prayed to make it to her eldest child's graduation. 'I cried through his entire senior year,' she said. In June, she watched her middle child graduate. 'Now I need to make it to the next one,' she said. Phillips, who co-founded a non-profit called the Young Lung Cancer Initiative to increase awareness of the condition, said people look at her askance when she tells them she has lung cancer but never smoked. They didn't know it was possible. It's not your grandfather's lung cancer anymore, she tells them. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Nina Agrawal and Allison Jiang Photographs by: Shuran Huang, Jon Cherry ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Boston Globe
22-07-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers. Scientists want to know why.
Chen's case represents a confounding reality for doctors who study and treat lung cancer, the deadliest cancer in the United States. The disease's incidence and death rates have dropped over the last few decades, thanks largely to a decline in cigarette use, but lung cancers unrelated to smoking have persisted. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The thinking used to be that smoking was 'almost the only cause of lung cancer,' said Dr. Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. But worldwide, roughly 10% to 25% of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50% or more. Advertisement These cancers are increasingly drawing the attention of researchers like Landi, who are studying the role that environmental exposures, genetic mutations or other risk factors might play. They have already found some early hints, including a clear link to air pollution. Advertisement Physicians are also testing new approaches to better detect lung cancer in nonsmokers, and trying to understand why it is more prevalent in people of Asian ancestry and women and why it is being seen among younger people. 'We all still think about the Marlboro man as what lung cancer looks like,' said Dr. Heather Wakelee, chief of oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In many cases, though, that's no longer true. 'We're just baffled as to why,' she said. Looking for Clues Many lung cancers in nonsmokers have no known cause and are discovered only by chance. That was the case for Sandra Liu, 59, who lives in New Jersey. Liu was diagnosed this year with adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer among nonsmokers. Doctors found the mass after she had a full-body checkup during a visit to China -- a process popular with some Chinese expatriates visiting the country that includes a chest scan. 'I would have never thought to go for a CT,' she said, noting she had no major symptoms and never smoked. Scientists are starting to see that the biology of cancer in nonsmokers like Liu differs from cancers seen in people with a smoking history -- and may require different strategies for prevention and detection. One large study, called 'Sherlock Lung' and led by Landi and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, is looking at the mutational signatures, or patterns of mutations across the cancer genomes, of 871 nonsmokers with lung cancer from around the world. Advertisement Their latest findings, published in Nature this month, showed that certain mutations, or changes to DNA, were much more common in people who lived in areas with high amounts of air pollution -- for example, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Uzbekistan. More pollution was linked to more mutations. (The study did not include data from India, considered to have the highest levels of outdoor pollution.) The researchers didn't just find that pollution may directly damage DNA. They also saw signs that pollution causes cells to divide more rapidly, which further increases the likelihood of cancer. Studies have also shown that people who don't smoke but have a family history of lung cancer, such as Chen and Liu -- both of Liu's grandfathers had the disease -- are at increased risk. This could be because of shared genetics, a common environment or both, said Dr. Jae Kim, chief of thoracic surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, California. And scientists know that nonsmokers with lung cancer are more likely than people who smoked to have certain kinds of 'driver' mutations, changes to the genome that can cause cancer and drive its spread, Kim said. In contrast, people who smoke tend to accumulate many mutations over time that can eventually lead to cancer. This difference in the type of mutations may be one reason lung cancer among people under 50 is more prevalent among nonsmokers than smokers. There are probably other factors, too, including exposure to radon, asbestos and possibly aristolochic acid, a compound once common in traditional Chinese medicine. Landi's research linked the compound to lung cancer mutations among Taiwanese patients. (Taiwan banned products containing it in 2003.) Advertisement Studies from Asia have also suggested secondhand smoke, fumes from cooking oils and a history of tuberculosis or other lung disease as possible culprits. However, these potential contributors are less common in the United States, where Asian American women who don't smoke are still nearly twice as likely as other women to be diagnosed with the disease, said Scarlett Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. To understand what's driving the disparity in the United States, Gomez, Wakelee and colleagues at other Northern California institutions are now studying the relationships among genes, environmental contaminants and lung cancer in Asian American nonsmoking women. 'Ultimately, we want to be able to come up with actionable risk factors, just like we do for breast cancer and colorectal cancer,' Gomez said. Revisiting Screening Guidance Studies like Gomez's may help address the question of who should be screened for lung cancer. In the United States, routine screening is recommended only for people ages 50 to 80 who smoked at least the equivalent of one pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years. Because of that, lung cancer in nonsmokers is often not caught until it's advanced, said Dr. Elaine Shum, an oncologist at NYU Langone Health. That can have devastating consequences for patients like Chen, who is still undergoing treatment after a third metastasis of her cancer. Shum and others are now exploring whether screening should be expanded. In Taiwan, a nationwide trial tested the effectiveness of CT scans in people ages 55 to 75 who never smoked but had one other risk factor. Doctors detected cancer in 2.6% of patients -- enough that Taiwan now offers routine screening for nonsmokers with a family history of lung cancer. Advertisement Shum and colleagues recently ran a similar pilot study among women of Asian ancestry who were 40 to 74 years old and had never smoked. They found invasive cancer at comparable rates to the Taiwan study. That study included only about 200 women, though. It would take far more research to determine who in the United States, if anyone, would benefit from broader screening and whether it could meaningfully reduce lung cancer deaths. Screening more people can lead to more false positives, which may mean patients get biopsies and other interventions they don't need. And some cancers doctors find are so slow-growing that they may never cause harm, said Dr. Natalie Lui, a thoracic surgeon at the Stanford University School of Medicine. 'What if we're taking out all these tiny lung cancers that would not have been life-threatening?' Lui said. On the flip side, she thinks of the patients she regularly sees who have aggressive or advanced lung cancers but never smoked. 'If there was screening, we could save their life,' Lui said. The good news is that survival with advanced cancers has improved with newer therapies that effectively keep the disease at bay for years in many patients. Such treatments have benefited Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Kentucky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. 'Go home and get your affairs in order,' Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13 and 14. Advertisement 'I'm not leaving my kids,' Phillips thought. After getting a second opinion, she started taking a drug that targets one of the driver mutations in lung cancer. She prayed to make it to her eldest child's graduation. 'I cried through his entire senior year,' she said. In June, she watched her middle child graduate. 'Now I need to make it to the next one,' she said. Phillips, who cofounded a nonprofit called the Young Lung Cancer Initiative to increase awareness of the condition, said people look at her askance when she tells them she has lung cancer but never smoked. They didn't know it was possible. It's not your grandfather's lung cancer anymore, she tells them. This article originally appeared in
New York Times
22-07-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Many Lung Cancers Are Now in Nonsmokers. Scientists Want to Know Why.
Annie Chen first noticed she was unusually short of breath in 2017, while running to catch the bus home to New Jersey from her job in Manhattan. She told her primary care doctor, thinking of her father, who died of lung cancer at 71. But her doctor told her not to worry — her father was a heavy smoker, and Ms. Chen had never smoked. She continued to have difficulty breathing, but it wasn't until two years later that a doctor ordered an X-ray, and Ms. Chen was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. 'My whole world crashed,' she said. She was just 48, with an 11-year-old daughter, a husband who also had health issues and a mortgage to pay off. 'My family needs me,' she recalled thinking. Ms. Chen's case represents a confounding reality for doctors who study and treat lung cancer, the deadliest cancer in the United States. The disease's incidence and death rates have dropped over the last few decades, thanks largely to a decline in cigarette use, but lung cancers unrelated to smoking have persisted. The thinking used to be that smoking was 'almost the only cause of lung cancer,' said Dr. Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. But worldwide, roughly 10 to 25 percent of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50 percent or more. These cancers are increasingly drawing the attention of researchers like Dr. Landi, who are studying the role that environmental exposures, genetic mutations or other risk factors might play. They have already found some early hints, including a clear link to air pollution. Physicians are also testing new approaches to better detect lung cancer in nonsmokers, and trying to understand why it is more prevalent in people of Asian ancestry and women and why it is being seen among younger people. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
NZ Herald
16-07-2025
- Health
- NZ Herald
Blood tests show promise in early cancer detection, and further large-scale studies are planned
But a study recruiting subjects this northern summer, funded by the National Cancer Institute, seeks to begin to do that by answering basic questions about how the tests perform in comparison to more conventional cancer screening. What will the study consider? A screening test given to millions of healthy people has to be accurate to avoid costly and anxiety-inducing follow-ups. And for it to become part of routine medical care, there needs to be evidence that the test can reliably find cancers – perhaps far earlier than routine methods. Most importantly, scientists want to see clear evidence that earlier detection leads to longer lives. To begin to fill this knowledge gap, scientists at nine sites around the United States are recruiting up to 24,000 people between the ages of 45 and 75 for the Vanguard Study. Participants will be randomly assigned to receive either regular screening or one of two multi-cancer detection tests. All of the groups will be told to continue with regular cancer screenings and will be followed over two years. The blood tests used in the study will screen for a variety of cancers, including many for which there aren't more traditional screening tests: bladder, breast, colorectal, oesophageal, stomach, liver, lung, ovarian, pancreatic, and prostate. Researchers, guided by what they learn from this first trial, hope to launch a much larger trial, with about 150,000 people, to definitively establish the effectiveness of these tests in preventing deaths. Bert Vogelstein has been working on these ideas for 30 years at Johns Hopkins Medicine and is a scientific founder of Exact Sciences, a company working to make blood tests for cancer screenings but is not involved in the new trial. He said the field is still in its adolescence. 'But adolescents can do a lot of great things, that's clear in athletics and it's clear in science,' Vogelstein said. 'I think what NCI is doing is great. And I applaud those efforts, because tests can do good or harm.' What are the benefits and harms? The benefit of early cancer detection is intuitive. People could roll up their sleeves and get a blood test to flag 20 cancers, allowing physicians to give early treatments when they have no symptoms. That could dramatically reduce the need for people to go through years of illness and advanced cancer treatments. 'That dream, to me, is decades off, but we're starting on it now – which is why it's so exciting,' said Scott Ramsey, a physician and researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre and a principal investigator with the Cancer Screening Research Network, which will be running the Vanguard study. 'We're not talking about treating people who are sick; we're talking about preventing people of dying [from] cancer in the first place.' The harms of screening are not always as clear to the public, but they show the trade-offs inherent when providing a medical intervention to healthy people. Ramsey pointed to the history around prostate specific antigen (PSA) tests, which identified many prostate cancers early – some of which would have never shown symptoms or caused death. That meant that many men were aggressively treated, with surgery and radiation that caused them to be incontinent or impotent for years or decades. The recommendations on how to test for prostate cancer changed as these trends became clear over decades. Ramsey said that now is the right moment to be subjecting these cancer blood tests to scrutiny. The potential for the tests is enormous, but there are fundamental questions that need to be answered about how and when they should be used – and, perhaps, when they shouldn't. What needs to happen next? The recent study in Cancer Discovery illustrated one of the major problems facing the field. To detect cancers early, the tests need a big boost in sensitivity, because they need to find fragments of cancer tumour DNA that are scarce. That study found that it was possible to detect cancer three or more years earlier than a traditional diagnosis. 'It can be done – and that's an important part of the article, much earlier than had ever been shown before,' said Vogelstein, part of the team behind the study. But to detect those trace amounts of genetic material, the sensitivity of the test had to be roughly 50 times higher than what it is in tests today, he said – and would likely cost a few thousand dollars. Ramsey said current US tests can be US$900 ($1511) or more. Health insurance carriers typically won't pay for them yet, because it isn't clear what their benefits and harms are. 'The bottom line is we don't know whether when taking one of these tests will give you an opportunity to live longer without cancer – or longer overall,' Ramsey said. 'There's never been a study that established that.'
