Children diagnosed with cancer may be more likely to pass away if they are obese, an unsettling study has found.
Obesity can increase the risk of some cancers, including breast, endometrial, ovarian, prostate, liver, gallbladder, kidney, and colon cancer, according to the NHS.
It can also lead to many other serious health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 Diabetes, and breathing problems, and affect quality of life due to difficulty in exercising, leading to, among other difficulties, social isolation.
In terms of children, obesity’s impact on cancer diagnoses has been explored in new research published by Cancer. The study, conducted in Canada, found that kids with obesity – when factors like age, sex, and ethnicity were cast aside – were 16 per cent more likely to suffer a relapse and 29 per cent more likely to succumb to the illness.
In short, overweight youngsters at greater risk of dying from the disease, which affects hundreds of children in Scotland. Around 330 children and young people in the country are diagnosed with cancer each year, which is almost one person per day. This includes around 120 children under 15 and 180 young people between 15 and 24.
“Our study highlights the negative impact of obesity among all types of childhood cancers,” said co–senior author Thai Hoa Tran, MD, of the Center Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine, in Montreal.
“It provides the rationale to evaluate different strategies to mitigate the adverse risk of obesity on cancer outcomes in future trials. It also reinforces the urgent need to reduce the epidemic of childhood obesity as it can result in significant health consequences.”
Among 11,291 children with cancer, 10.5 per cent were obese at the time of diagnosis, according to the findings. Those with obesity had lower rates of five-year event-free survival (77.5 per cent versus 79.6 per cent) and overall survival (83.0 per cent versus 85.9 per cent).
The negative impact of obesity on prognosis was especially pronounced in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and brain tumours.
In Scotland, the most common types of childhood cancer are leukaemia and brain and central nervous system cancers, according to Public Health Scotland.
Most childhood cancers have high survival rates, but 6.6 per cent of children and 3.3 per cent of young people die within the first year of diagnosis. In 2019, a separate study found that 15 per cent of children and adolescents diagnosed with cancer in Scotland were obese at the time of diagnosis.
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