Britain’s obesity epidemic is a key factor behind increases in the number of women diagnosed with womb cancer, Cancer Research UK has said.
Stark increases in the proportion of the population having the disease over two decades are also reported in “worrying” statistics, published by the charity on Wednesday.
The number of new cases of womb cancer climbed from about 4,800 a year in 1993, when the annual death toll from the disease was about 1,500, to about 9,000 new diagnoses and 2,000 deaths in 2013.
About 19 women in every 100,000 developed the disease based on three-year rolling averages from 1993-95. That climbed to 29 in every 100,000 from 2011-13.
Cancer Research UK has been highlighting the dangers posed by being overweight or obese for many years and only in January warned that 700,000 more people in the UK could develop some form of cancer linked to being overweight if current trends continued.
Jonathan Ledermann, the director of the Cancer Research UK and UCL Cancer Trials Centre , said: “It is worrying that womb cancer cases are going up so sharply. We don’t know all the reasons why. But we do know that about a third of cases are linked to being overweight so it is no surprise to see the increases in womb cancer cases echo rising obesity levels,” Ledermann said.
“The good news is that thanks to research and improved treatments survival has improved. In the 1970s, almost six in 10 women diagnosed with the disease survived for at least 10 years. Now almost eight in 10 women survive.”
More needed to be known about the biology of the cancer and how extra weight could cause the disease, the charity said. There was evidence that extra fat could raise cancer risk by producing hormones and growth factors that encouraged cells to divide.
Lack of exercise and taking hormone replacement therapy as well as age and genetic makeup were also risk factors.
Julie Sharp, the head of health information at the charity, said it was important to inform women about ways to reduce their risk of developing womb cancer. “Obesity is linked to 10 different types of cancer, including womb cancer, and is the single biggest preventable cause of disease after smoking.
“While there are no guarantees against cancer, keeping a healthy weight can help you stack the odds in your favour and has lots of other benefits too.”
