Obesity at the time of cancer diagnosis in children may affect the survival rates, according to a study on Monday.
Over 390 million children and adolescents aged 5–19 years were overweight in 2022, including 160 million who were living with obesity, as per data from the World Health Organization (WHO). Obesity is a known precursor to many non-communicable diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and cancer.
“Our study highlights the negative impact of obesity among all types of childhood cancers. It provides the rationale to evaluate different strategies to mitigate the adverse risk of obesity on cancer outcomes in future trials,” said Thai Hoa Tran from the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine in Montreal, Canada.
The team conducted a retrospective study on 11,291 children newly diagnosed with cancer from 2001 to 2020, across Canada.
Of these children, aged 2 to 18 years, 10.5 per cent were obese at the time of diagnosis.
Compared with patients without obesity at the time of initial cancer diagnosis, those with obesity had lower rates of 5-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).
After adjusting for factors including age, sex, ethnicity, neighborhood income quintile, treatment era, and cancer categories, the team found that obesity at diagnosis was linked with a 16 per cent increase in the risk of relapse. There was also a 29 per cent increase in the risk of death, revealed the study, published in the journal Cancer.
The negative impact of obesity on prognosis was especially pronounced in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and brain tumours, said the team.
The study “also reinforces the urgent need to reduce the epidemic of childhood obesity as it can result in significant health consequences,” Tran said.
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