Pregnancy weight-gain linked to cancer

Women who gain more than 50lbs during pregnancy and fail to lose it after birth can triple their risk of breast cancer, a study revealed yesterday.

Women who gain more than 50lbs during pregnancy and fail to lose it after birth can triple their risk of breast cancer, a study revealed yesterday.

Excessive weight gain during pregnancy can cause changes to the breast tissue which increases the chance of developing cancer after the menopause, scientists said.

They studied the case notes of more than 27,000 breast cancer patients in Finland for information about when the disease was diagnosed and how a woman's weight increased during pregnancy. Each 2.2lbs (1kg) increase raised the breast cancer risk by 3.9 per cent when adjusted for weight and height before pregnancy.

A weight gain of 40lbs in pregancy increased breast cancer risk by 40 per cent, the report presented to the American Association for Cancer Research in San Francisco said.

Weight gain of 25 to 35lbs is normal in pregnancy and was not associated with any risk increase, Dr Leena Hilakivi-Clarke, one of the investigators from the Lombardi cancer centre at Georgetown University in Washington DC, said. She emphasised that larger weight gains only increased the risk of cancer after menopause.

Another team at the meeting said a protein found in breast tumours may provide an early warning system that could spot dangerously aggressive cancer long before it starts to spread. Early results suggest that the protein, called Rhoc, can identify such tumours when they measure less than a centimetre across.

Dr Celina Kleer, from the University of Michigan Medical School, who led the research, said this was a very promising marker for small but invasive breast cancers that may spread, or metastasise, which now are hard to identify. A test to detect the protein is more than a year away from clinical trials, she added.