Obesity increases risk of cancer in youngsters: study

Youngsters who are obese have a higher risk of getting cancer, a new study says, adding that young adults who have body mass indexes of more than 30 are at risk of getting 13 different types of cancers.

"Young people with body mass indexes over 30 are more likely to experience aggressive malignancies," said the lead author of the study Nathan A. Berger, Professor at the Case Western Reserve University.

Even after losing weight, can risk remains. "If you are obese, you are at a higher risk of cancer. If you lose weight, it improves the prognosis and may lower your risk, but it never goes away completely," says Berger. Obesity causes changes to a person’s DNA that can increase cancer risk and remain long even after a person loses weight.

Berger's review shows that over activates the immune system to produce harmful byproducts like peroxide and oxygen radicals that mutate DNA. It can also alter a person’s metabolism, which causes hormone imbalances that help cancer cells grow.

Obese people with acid reflux risk getting esophageal cancer due to damages in their swallowing tubes. "Even if one pathway is successfully blocked, obesity-induced cancer takes another path," Berger says.

Adults with a history of obesity are twice as likely to develop multiple myeloma, Berger says, adding that it can also shorten cancer timelines by shrinking the period between benign and malignant cancer progression.

This may be one of the reasons for increase in cancer rates among young adults.

What can be done to prevent this? Early cancer screening tailored to young people and a detailed information of a person’s weight history should be maintained. But the most “effective way to curtail development of this problem is to prevent the expansion of the obesity pandemic in both children and adults," says Berger. If this is not done then more than 110 million children and adolescents with obesity worldwide are at risk of developing obesity-related cancers.