Belly fat big concern for women with kidney cancer

Representational PictureTurns out belly fat is much bigger a concern than just regular fitness for women According to a Washington University School of Medicinestudy belly fat affects the odds of women surviving kidney cancer but not men Half of female kidney cancer patients with substantial abdominal fat at the time of diagnosis died within 3 12 years while more than half of women with little belly fat were still alive 10 years later the researchers found For men the amount of abdominal fat appeared to make no difference in how long they survivedThe findings suggested that kidney cancer may develop and progress differently in women than men Were just beginning to study sex as an important variable in cancer said senior author Joseph Ippolito Men and women have very different metabolisms A tumor growing in a mans body is in a different environment than one growing inside a woman so its not surprising that the cancers behave differently between the sexes Excess weight is a major risk factor for the development of kidney cancer but it does not necessarily portend a poor outcome Rather the new study suggests that how long a patient survives after diagnosis is linked not to total fat but to the distribution of body fat at least for womenMost methods of estimating body fat rely on just a persons height and weight But not all fat is the same The kind you can squeeze called subcutaneous fat seems to be mostly harmless But visceral fat which lies within the abdomen and encases internal organs has been associated with diabetes heart disease and many kinds of cancer Visceral fat sits too deep inside the abdomen to be measured accurately with a tape measure around a persons waist Instead Ippolito and colleagues analysed crosssectional CT scans which are routinely performed on people newly diagnosed with kidney cancer to measure the size of tumors and to look for metastasesSubcutaneous and visceral fat are located in different areas of the body on a CT scan making it possible to calculate the proportion of each The researchers analysed images from 145 men and 77 women with kidney cancer The scans were drawn from The Cancer Imaging Archive a collection of demographic clinical and imaging data on hundreds of cancer patients The researchers found that half of the women with high visceral fat died within 3 and a half years of diagnosis while more than half of the women with low visceral fat were still alive after 12 years Women often gain visceral fat after menopause but the link still held after correcting for ageFor men there was no correlation between visceral fat and length of survival We know there are differences in healthy male versus healthy female metabolism Ippolito said Not only in regard to how the fat is carried but how their cells use glucose fatty acids and other nutrients So the fact that visceral fat matters for women but not men suggests that something else is going on besides just excess weight That something else could lie in the tumor cells themselves Tumor cells prefer sugar as a fuel source but some have more of a sweet tooth than others A sugarhungry tumor typically spells trouble for patientsBoth men and women were less likely to survive if their tumor cells had switched on the genes associated with consuming sugar or glycolysis Men whose tumor cells exhibited low glycolysis survived an average of 9 and half years whereas those with highglycolysis tumors survived for only six years on average The researchers found 77 women with matched imaging and gene expression data so they combined their analyses of visceral fat and glycolysis About a quarter of the women had a high amount of visceral fat and tumors whose glycolysis genes were significantly activeThose women survived only two years after diagnosis on average Strikingly of the 19 women who fell into the low visceral fat and low glycolysis category none died before the end of the study which covered a span of 12 years There was no group of men with a similarly rosy prognosis We found theres a group of women thats doing really poorly relative to everyone else and a group thats doing really well Ippolito said Our data suggest that there is a potential synergy between the patients visceral fat and the metabolism of their tumor That can be a starting point to figure out how to better treat women with kidney cancer We would not have discovered this if we had been looking at men and women together The study appears online in the journal RadiologyCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and Hatke news here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updatesThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever