Adding Insult to Injury

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s more to report on the plague of obesity and how it exacerbates poor health diagnoses.

The latest is with regards to breast cancer. For a number of women diagnosed with breast cancer (men can be diagnosed with breast cancer as well, but the predominant number of breast cancer diagnoses are among women), they develop after-effects that make life very uncomfortable to say the least. It’s a condition called lymphedema, and it makes itself apparent when pain shoots its way throughout the shoulder/arm pit/chest region due to excessive fluid that builds up after lymph nodes were removed in surgery.

To say the least, it’s a very painful condition that gets progressively worse before it gets better. In short, it’s a debilitating condition that has no known cure (various exercises can help minimize painful flare-ups, however).

Of course, the last thing any woman diagnosed with breast cancer wants is to add insult to injury in the form of lymphedema. But according to a new study, women diagnosed with breast cancer and who are obese dramatically increase their risk for developing this painful problem.

As it is, the risk of developing lymphedema is high; about 30 percent of women get its symptoms and are diagnosed within a year and a half after breast cancer surgery. But researchers from the University of Missouri have found this “sidling” side effect – “sidling” in that it tends to present itself when surgery is performed on a woman’s dominant side – is seen more prevalently among obese women. So much so, in fact, that their risk is increased 40 to 60 percent – that’s on top of the 30 percent increased risk that already exists!

The University of Missouri researchers’ full report is in the appropriately named Journal of Lymphedema. The study itself involved approximately 200 women.

This is a cause for concern, particularly in a world where obesity rates have reached 300 million. If that’s not an epidemic-sized problem, I don’t know what is. That said, there is some good news to report. Overall, cancer diagnoses and deaths are down in 2008 compared to 2007 – most notably, breast cancer diagnoses. According to the annual report issued for 2008, the marked drop in cancer diagnoses is largely due, at least in part, to the decline in breast and colorectal cancers.

But as the American Cancer Society also reported – and as has been discussed here at length as well – the link cancer has to obesity remains a problem. And I’m certain that’s why other cancer diagnoses have seen an incline over the past year, like liver, kidney and esophageal cancers.

This study serves as yet another reason why women need to do all they can to remain as fit as possible and to make fitness a real priority in the coming year. While breast cancer rates have declined, approximately one in four cancer diagnoses among women remain breast cancer. And just as obesity rates have steadily increased between now and 1960, so too have the breast cancer incidence rates: going from one in 20 women in 1960 to one in eight women in 2008.

To keep breast cancer rates and lymphedema rates on the decline, obesity rates need to decline as well.

Let us hope that comes to fruition in 2009.