If you knew there was a way to reduce your risk of a brain tumor, you’d take it, right? Well, now it looks like that may be possible.
A new study has found that being overweight and obese doesn’t just put you at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and early death (though that’s quite the list already). Now, it looks like it could make you more likely to develop brain cancer.
Yep, it’s true. The numbers don’t lie, and the study performed to find this information consisted of over 900,000 people.
The adult (20 and over) population of the United States is 69 percent overweight or obese, so this isn’t exactly good news.
But let’s look at the numbers.
This study, done on adults 50 or older, found that being overweight or obese accounted for 14 percent of cancer deaths in men and 20 percent of cancer deaths in women. Then, to further refine it, researchers looked the development of brain tumors, and weight and physical activity’s effect on developing them.
There were comparisons done with those with brain tumors and those without. Overweight people were found to be 21 percent more likely to develop a brain tumor than someone at a healthy weight, and obese people were 54 percent more likely to develop one.
Of course, being active was one of the main contributors to decreasing brain cancer risk. High physical activity levels showed a 27 percent decrease in likeliness to get a brain tumor.
The lead author, Gundula Behrens of the University of Regensburg in Germany, said:
“This is an important finding since there are few known risk factors from meningioma and the ones we do know about are not things a person can change…these findings may be relevant for strategies aimed at reducing the risk of meningioma.”
