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Overweight? Good Cholesterol May Fight Cancer
Aug. 3, 2004 -- Older women may now be able to lower their risk of breast cancer after menopause.
The prescription: exercise. It is already the Rx for a long and healthy life. Now it looks as though reduced breast cancer risk can be added to the list of exercise benefits, says Anne-Sofie Furberg, PhD, of the Institute of Community Medicine at the University of Tromsø in Norway.
Furberg and colleagues find that overweight, postmenopausal women with high levels of good HDL cholesterol have 67% less breast cancer than similar women with low HDL levels.
"We found that if a woman is both overweight/obese and has low levels of this good HDL cholesterol, she has an increased risk of postmenopausal breast cancer," Furberg tells WebMD.
What does this have to do with exercise? Low HDL cholesterol is part of a bad health spiral called the metabolic syndrome. Other parts of this syndrome include abdominal obesity, sugar intolerance, high blood-fat levels or triglycerides, and high blood pressure (140/90 or higher). People with the metabolic syndrome are on the fast track to diabetes and heart disease. Abdominal obesity is defined physically as a waist circumference of more than 40 inches in men and greater than 35 inches in women.
Metabolic syndrome is on the rise. So is breast cancer. Is there a link? Furberg and colleagues used HDL cholesterol as a marker for metabolic syndrome. They looked at data on nearly 40,000 Norwegian women aged 17 to 54.
HDL levels had nothing to do with breast cancer in young women. It didn't seem to make much difference in breast cancer rates for older women, either -- unless they were overweight. Then it made a big difference. There were two-thirds fewer breast cancers among overweight, postmenopausal women who had high HDL levels than among overweight, postmenopausal women who had low HDL levels.
That's interesting, says Ruth M. O'Regan, MD, director of translational breast cancer research at Emory University's Winship Cancer Center in Atlanta.
"The idea is that most of a postmenopausal woman's estrogen is made in [fat] tissue," O'Regan tells WebMD. "So the more fat you have, the more likely you are to make estrogen."
Furberg thinks the higher risk of breast cancer seen after menopause in the women with low HDL cholesterol is due to "an unfavorable hormone profile." This, she says, isn't just a matter of weight. It's likely due to the metabolic syndrome.
"I think it is important for overweight/obese women to look not only at weight, but also at physical activity," she says. "From studies of heart disease we know the [blood fat and blood cholesterol] profile is dependent on physical activity level."
Most of a woman's after-menopause breast cancer risk comes from genetic factors, O'Regan says. Other than avoiding long-term hormone therapy, there hasn't been much to tell a woman about how to reduce her breast cancer risk. Now, she says, the Furberg team's findings give women another reason to get fit.
"Remember that getting exercise and keeping the weight down is good for any woman who wants to improve her health," O'Regan says.
Furberg and colleagues report their findings in the Aug. 4 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
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