Published: April 3, 2012
PLoS Medicine: Ovarian Cancer and Body Size: Individual Participant Meta-Analysis Including 25,157 Women with Ovarian Cancer from 47 Epidemiological Studies
Background
Only
about half the studies that have collected information on the relevance
of women's height and body mass index to their risk of developing
ovarian cancer have published their results, and findings are
inconsistent. Here, we bring together the worldwide evidence, published
and unpublished, and describe these relationships.........
Why Was This Study Done?
To
date, there is no definitive information about the relevance of women's
height, weight, and body mass index to their subsequent risk of
developing ovarian cancer. There have been roughly 50 epidemiological
studies of ovarian cancer, but only about half of these studies have
published results on the association between body size and ovarian
cancer risk, and so far, these findings have been inconsistent.
Therefore, the researchers—an international collaboration of researchers
studying ovarian cancer—re-analyzed the available epidemiological
evidence to investigate the relationship between ovarian cancer risk and
adult height, weight, and body mass index, and to examine the
consistency of the findings across study designs.
Conclusions
Ovarian
cancer is associated with height and, among never-users of hormone
therapy, with body mass index. In high-income countries, both height and
body mass index have been increasing in birth cohorts now developing
the disease. If all other relevant factors had remained constant, then
these increases in height and weight would be associated with a 3%
increase in ovarian cancer incidence per decade.
