Health
Men face higher cancer risk with this specific body fat measurement
Obesity has long been established as a risk factor for cancer, particularly when it’s stored in certain areas of the body.
Now, new research suggests that a larger waist circumference is a bigger risk factor than body mass index (BMI) for obesity-related cancers — but only for men, not for women.
The findings, which were published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, will be presented in May at the European Congress on Obesity in Malaga, Spain.
BMI IS WRONG WAY TO MEASURE OBESITY, RESEARCHERS SAY
The study was led by Dr. Ming Sun, Dr. Josef Fritz and Dr. Tanja Stocks from Lund University in Sweden.
New research suggests that a larger waist circumference is a bigger risk factor than body mass index for obesity-related cancers — but only for men, not for women. (iStock)
The researchers analyzed data from 340,000 Swedish people averaging 51 years of age whose BMI and waist circumference assessments were performed between 1981 and 2019, according to a press release.
They then compared those statistics to cancer diagnoses pulled from the Swedish Cancer Register.
‘HIDDEN’ FAT COULD PREDICT ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE UP TO 20 YEARS BEFORE SYMPTOMS, RESEARCH FINDS
Over a period of 14 years, there were 18,185 diagnoses of obesity-related cancers among the patients in the study.
For men, an increase in waist circumference of around 11 cm resulted in a 25% higher risk of obesity-related cancer.
This was a bigger risk factor than having an increased BMI, which increased the chances by 19%.
For men, an increase in waist circumference of around 11 cm resulted in a 25% higher risk of obesity-related cancer. (iStock)
For women, an increase of about 12 cm in waist circumference and an increase in BMI were both linked to a 13% greater cancer risk, the study found.
Obesity-related cancers include cancers of the oesophagus (adenocarcinoma), gastric (cardia), colon, rectum, liver/intrahepatic bile ducts, gallbladder, pancreas, breast (postmenopausal), endometrium, ovary, renal cell carcinoma, meningioma, thyroid and multiple myeloma, the release stated.
“BMI is a measure of body size, but does not provide information on fat distribution, whereas waist circumference is a proxy more closely related to abdominal adiposity.”
Overall, the researchers found waist circumference to be a more accurate cancer predictor than BMI.
“BMI is a measure of body size, but does not provide information on fat distribution, whereas waist circumference is a proxy more closely related to abdominal adiposity,” they wrote.
“This distinction is crucial because visceral fat, which accumulates around the abdominal organs, is more metabolically active and has been implicated in adverse health outcomes, including insulin resistance, inflammation and abnormal blood fat levels. Consequently, individuals with similar BMIs may have distinct cancer risks due to differences in fat distribution.”
Why the difference between men and women?
One potential reason for the gender discrepancy, according to the researchers, is that men are more likely to store fat viscerally (in the belly), while women generally accumulate more subcutaneous fat (under the skin) and peripheral fat (in the arms and legs).
ALZHEIMER’S AND PARKINSON’S RISK IS HIGHER FOR PEOPLE WITH BODY FAT IN TWO SPECIFIC AREAS
“Consequently, waist circumference is a more accurate measure of visceral fat in men than in women,” the researchers wrote.
“This may make waist circumference a stronger risk factor of cancer in men, and explain why waist circumference adds risk information beyond that conveyed by BMI in men, but not women.”
The researchers suggested that combining hip circumference with waist circumference in women could give a more accurate estimation of visceral fat. (iStock)
Excess body fat is also linked to higher insulin levels in men than in women, the researchers noted, which could be a factor in waist circumference being more strongly linked to men’s cancer risk.
“The divergence in how waist circumference and BMI relate to cancer risk between men and women underscores the complexity of the impact of adiposity (excess body fat) on cancer development,” the researchers wrote.
“It suggests that considering biological and physiological differences between the sexes might be helpful when assessing cancer risk. Further research is needed to explore these sex differences.”
They also suggested that combining hip circumference with waist circumference in women could give a more accurate estimation of visceral fat.
“Waist circumference is a more accurate measure of visceral fat in men than in women,” the researchers wrote. (iStock)
Dr. Marc Siegel, clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health and Fox News senior medical analyst, was not involved in the study, but reinforced that BMI is a “good indicator of obesity, but is not the only one.”
“Belly fat contains a lot of the inflammatory chemicals that act as carcinogens.”
“Obesity leads to inflammation, and inflammation correlates with many kinds of cancer, including breast and prostate and cancers of the gastrointestinal tract,” he told Fox News Digital.
“It is not surprising that waist circumference in men could be a more precise indicator if measured properly, because belly fat contains a lot of the inflammatory chemicals that act as carcinogens,” the doctor noted.
Obesity-related cancers include cancers of the oesophagus (adenocarcinoma), gastric (cardia), colon, rectum, liver/intrahepatic bile ducts, gallbladder, pancreas, breast (postmenopausal), endometrium, ovary, renal cell carcinoma, meningioma, thyroid and multiple myeloma. (American Cancer Society/Getty Images)
For women, where fat distribution is somewhat different, Siegel agrees that it “makes sense” to consider both waist and hip circumference, as the Swedish study suggests.
“The study looks at over 300,000 people and is an important new reference, but it is observational, so it shows an association, but not proof,” the doctor added.
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Dr. Brett Osborn, a Florida neurosurgeon and longevity expert, also detailed the different ways in which men and women store fat.
“While women accumulate more subcutaneous fat — on the hips, thighs and buttocks — men pack it around the waist, deep inside the abdomen,” Osborn, who was not involved in the study, told Fox News Digital.
“This is visceral fat, and it’s metabolically toxic. It’s not just sitting there. It’s active, like a gland, secreting inflammatory chemicals (cytokines), raising insulin levels, disrupting hormones and laying the groundwork for cancer cell growth.”
Strength training three times per week is ideal, one doctor advised, adding, “Resistance training reduces visceral fat and inflammation.” (iStock)
Osborn reiterated that BMI is limited in its ability to accurately measure excess fat.
“First, BMI doesn’t factor in muscle mass, so a short, stocky individual with a low body fat percentage may be categorized as overweight or obese, when in fact quite the opposite is true,” he said.
“Second, BMI doesn’t tell you where the body fat is, and as it turns out, that’s what’s critical — at least in men.”
Minimizing risk
To reduce cancer risk, Osborn recommends that men measure their waistlines to ensure they’re in a healthy range. People can also track their visceral fat score on a medical-grade anthropometry scale, he said.
“Understand that belly fat isn’t just cosmetic — it’s carcinogenic.”
“Anything above 40 inches (102 cm) is a red flag,” he told Fox News Digital.
Strength training three times per week is ideal, the doctor advised, adding, “Resistance training reduces visceral fat and inflammation.”
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Proper nutrition is also important, he said. “Eat like your life depends on it — because it does. Stop feeding your cancer risk.”
“Understand that belly fat isn’t just cosmetic — it’s carcinogenic,” Osborn added. “You may not feel it now, but the clock is ticking. Visceral fat is silent, aggressive and deadly — and it’s doing damage even if your BMI is ‘normal.’”
Doctors in West Texas are seeing measles patients whose illnesses have been complicated by an alternative therapy endorsed by vaccine skeptics including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary.
Parents in Gaines County, Texas, the center of a raging measles outbreak, have increasingly turned to supplements and unproven treatments to protect their children, many of whom are unvaccinated, against the virus.
One of those supplements is cod liver oil containing vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy has promoted as a near miraculous cure for measles. Physicians at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, say they’ve now treated a handful of unvaccinated children who were given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.
Some of them had received unsafe doses of cod liver oil and other vitamin A supplements for several weeks in an attempt to prevent a measles infection, said Dr. Summer Davies, who cares for acutely ill children at the hospital.
“I had a patient that was only sick a couple of days, four or five days, but had been taking it for like three weeks,” Dr. Davies said.
While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to manage severe measles, experts do not recommend taking it without physician supervision. Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles; however, two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are about 97 percent effective.
At high doses, vitamin A can cause liver damage; dry, peeling skin; hair loss; and, in rare instances, seizures and coma. So far, doctors at West Texas hospitals have said they’ve seen patients with yellowed skin and high levels of liver enzymes in their bloodwork, both signs of a damaged liver.
Many of those patients had been in the hospital for a severe measles infection; doctors discovered the liver damage only after routine lab work.
As of Tuesday, the outbreak, which began in January, had spread to more than 320 people in Texas. Forty patients have been hospitalized, and one child has died.
In neighboring New Mexico counties, the virus has sickened 43 and hospitalized two. Seven confirmed cases in Oklahoma have also been linked to the outbreak.
Local doctors and health officials have become increasingly concerned about the growing popularity of unproven remedies for preventing and treating measles, which they fear is causing people to delay critical medical treatment and to reject vaccination, the only proven way to prevent a measles infection.
In Gaines County, alternative medicine has always been popular. Many in the area’s large Mennonite community, where most cases have been clustered, avoid interacting with the medical system and adhere to a long tradition of natural remedies.
Health officials said the recent popularity of vitamin A use for measles could be traced back to a Fox News interview with Mr. Kennedy, in which he said he had heard of “almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery” with treatments like cod liver oil, which he said was “the safest application of vitamin A.”
In an opinion essay for The Washington Post on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin Griffis, who was until last week the communications director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote that he had resigned in part because of Mr. Kennedy’s handling of the outbreak.
“In my final weeks at the C.D.C., I watched as career infectious-disease experts were tasked with spending precious hours searching medical literature in vain for data to support Kennedy’s preferred treatments,” Mr. Griffis wrote.
In the weeks after the Fox News interview, drugstores in West Texas struggled to keep vitamin A and cod liver oil supplements on their shelves. “I did not hear anything about vitamin A until he said it on television,” said Katherine Wells, the director of public health in Lubbock.
One local doctor — whom Mr. Kennedy named in the Fox News interview as one of the physicians who had told him “what is working on the ground”— opened a makeshift clinic in Gaines County and began doling out various treatments, including vitamin A supplements, to treat active measles cases and to prevent infection.
Dr. Davies said she suspected that a majority of the children she had treated had taken vitamin A supplements at home.
Experts say that vitamin A can play an important role in the “supportive care” that doctors provide to patients with severe measles infections.
It works by replenishing the bodily stores depleted by the virus, which bolsters the immune system, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
In the hospital, physicians give only two doses of the vitamin to children with measles, usually over the course of two days, and “very carefully calibrate” the amounts depending on age and weight, he said.
Dr. Schaffner emphasized that it is not a miracle treatment for the virus, and that there is no antiviral medication for measles. And there is no credible evidence that vitamin A helps prevent infection in children in the United States, where vitamin A deficiencies are exceedingly rare.
In fact, giving children repeated, high doses of the vitamin is dangerous. Unlike other vitamins, which are flushed out of the body through urine, excess vitamin A accumulates in fat tissue, making it more likely to reach dangerous levels over time.
“That kind of preventative use I think is especially concerning,” said Dr. Lara Johnson, another doctor at the Lubbock hospital.
“When we have kids taking it for weeks and weeks, then you do potentially have a cumulative impact of the toxicity,” she added.
Dr. Johnson added that local physicians were particularly concerned about parents’ relying on over-the-counter supplements — whose labels don’t always accurately reflect the amount of vitamin they contain — and accepting dosage recommendations from unverified sources.
The cure for baldness has long been a scientific enigma.
Yet advanced treatment options and hair-loss clinics have continued to emerge — and researchers are making progress on finding fixes for balding.
UCLA scientists recently alerted a “breakthrough” discovery involving a molecule named PP405 that can “waken long-slumbering but undamaged” hair follicles, according to a press release.
CURE FOR MEN’S HAIR LOSS COULD BE FOUND IN SUGAR STORED IN THE BODY, STUDY SUGGESTS
In a 2023 clinical trial, researchers found that applying PP405 as a topical medicine to the scalp at bedtime showed “statistically significant” results.
They believe this treatment will produce “full ‘terminal’ hair rather than the peach fuzz variety.”
PP405 is now in Phase 2 clinical trials for men and women with androgenetic alopecia, according to a researcher. (iStock)
William Lowry, Ph.D., a co-researcher at UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center, told Fox News Digital that although this research is promising, “cure is a strong word.”
“There are only two FDA-approved treatments for androgenetic alopecia (AGA, or pattern baldness): minoxidil and finasteride,” he said in an interview.
“They are both limited in efficacy and improve hair in only a portion of patients who take them.”
THESE 5 BALDING AND HAIR LOSS TREATMENTS COULD HELP ENSURE A HEALTHY SCALP, EXPERTS SAY
Other treatment options include supplements, red light therapy, platelet-rich plasma injections and hair transplantation, Lowry said, although these have not undergone “definitive clinical trials and can be expensive, time-consuming and limited in efficacy.”
He added, “None of these are curative, meaning none of them permanently restore all hair lost due to AGA.”
Some treatment options for hair loss are “limited in efficacy,” said a co-researcher (not pictured) at UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center in LA. (iStock)
Lowry and his fellow researchers have discovered that hair follicle stem cells have a “distinct metabolism from other cells in the follicle.”
He said, “We found that promoting this metabolism can accelerate stem cell activation, which makes new hairs grow. We subsequently developed drugs that can drive this effect in various models of hair loss that reflect the multifactorial drivers of androgenetic alopecia in patients.”
HAIR LOSS AND PROSTATE MEDICATION COULD ALSO REDUCE HEART DISEASE RISK, STUDY FINDS
PP405 has become the leading candidate for hair-loss treatment as part of this new class of drugs.
“We are excited about the opportunity to bring a novel treatment option to patients with hair loss based on strong science and rigorous clinical trials,” he said.
“Additionally, because the mechanism of action we discovered is distinct from previous approaches, it can potentially be used in combination with other therapies.”
“This novel class of drugs drove the formation of Pelage Pharmaceuticals, a regenerative medicine biotech developing new treatments for hair loss, with PP405 being the lead candidate.” (iStock)
Brendan Camp, M.D., a Manhattan-based dermatologist, told Fox News Digital in an interview that hair loss is a condition that “affects many and can have a negative impact on people’s psychosocial health.”
So identifying a potential new hair-loss treatment is an “exciting step for patients and providers in the management of what can otherwise be a difficult condition to treat.”
‘New Botox’
Camp agreed there is an “unmet need” for hair-loss treatment and that there’s growing interest in providing solutions and offering hair restoration services more widely.
HAIR LOSS? GUT HEALTH ISSUES? DR. NICOLE SAPHIER REVEALS SMART FIXES
As cosmetic injections such as Botox and fillers have continued to be popular anti-aging and beauty treatments, hair-loss and restoration med spas are similarly surfacing nationwide.
The clinics offer a variety of services for men and women given the availability of modern options.
Early intervention when to balding is “key,” said one expert. (iStock)
Dr. Amy Spizuoco, DO, of True Dermatology in New York, dubbed balding treatments in this capacity the “new Botox.”
“With advances in treatments like minoxidil, finasteride, PRP (platelet-rich plasma) therapy, hair transplants and the latest stem cell research, hair restoration has become more accessible and effective,” she told Fox News Digital.
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“And much like Botox is used preventatively, younger people are tackling hair loss at the first signs rather than waiting until it’s severe.”
Camp added that while there are many hair-loss treatment options available, the response will look different for each person.
Medications such as minoxidil, finasteride and dutasteride can “slow down the process and even grow hair back,” one expert said, while procedures such as PRP, low-level laser therapy and hair transplants are also effective. (iStock)
“When looking for a treatment, stick to those with a well-established body of evidence and data to support their use, such as minoxidil, finasteride and spironolactone (in the case of female-pattern hair loss),” he advised.
For more Health articles, visit foxnews.com/health
And be sure to get “the advice of a board-certified dermatologist when at-home treatments are not effective,” he also said.
These treatments are “typically used indefinitely” and should be tested for three to four months before being ruled out as effective or not, the dermatologist added.
Spizuoco said that while hair loss is common, early intervention with the right treatment plan can “significantly slow it down or possibly reverse it.”
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