Clifford A. Hudis, MD, chief, Breast Cancer Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, professor of medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, discusses the challenges of understanding the link between obesity and cancer.

Hudis says one of the challenges of scientifically approaching the problem of obesity in cancer is developing evidence in order to give meaningful advice to patients.

Researchers are unsure if all obesity patients are the same, or if there’s a subset where an intervention might make a difference. Hudis says it is theorized that this subset is the majority of patients who have inflammation. It is also theorized that there is a subset of patients who are not obese, but still have inflammation.

Since it is hypothesized that inflammation is the target, researchers wonder if anti-inflammatory drugs would make a difference or if more conventional methods such as diet and exercise would be the better intervention.

While researchers don’t have compelling evidence for specific interventions, Hudis says substantial evidence suggests that weight loss and a healthy diet are generally useful outside of cancer.  

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Dr. Hudis on the Challenges of Understanding Obesity and Cancer

Clifford A. Hudis, MD, chief, Breast Cancer Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, professor of medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, discusses the link between obesity and cancer.

Hudis says the problem of obesity in the United States is a relatively new issue and has profound medical consequences. Many people know that obesity can lead to arthritis, diabetes and hypertension, but obesity can also cause pancreatitis, gallstones, reflux esophagitis and other ailments including cancer, Hudis says.

Researchers have known that obesity was associated with some specific cancers, such as uterine cancer and breast cancer but they are now discovering that obesity is also associated with colon cancer and high-grade prostate cancers.

Hudis says the reason obesity is associated with cancer is the biochemical reactions that take place when a patient is obese. There are inflammatory cellular structures within the fat tissue that produce inflammatory mediators, which activate aromatase. The activation of aromatase is associate with both breast cancer and endometrial cancer, Hudis says.â€‹

Clifford A. Hudis, MD

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