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Risk of breast, endometrial, colorectal, and renal cancers in postmenopausal women in association with a body shape index and other anthropometric measures

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An Erratum to this article was published on 27 July 2017

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Abstract

Purpose

A body shape index (ABSI) has been proposed as a possible improvement over waist circumference (WC) as a marker of abdominal adiposity because it removes the correlation of WC with body mass index (BMI) and with height. We assessed the association of ABSI with four obesity-related cancers compared to that of other anthropometric measures of adiposity.

Methods

We used data from the Women’s Health Initiative, a large cohort of postmenopausal women, recruited between 1993 and 1998 and followed until September 2013, to assess the associations of ABSI and other anthropometric measures with risk of cancers of the breast, endometrium, colorectum, and kidney. The four comparison anthropometric measures were BMI, WC, waist circumference-to-height ratio (WHtR), and waist-hip ratio (WHR). Over a median of 12.7 years of follow-up, among 143,901 women, we identified 7,039 invasive breast cancers, 1,157 endometrial cancers, 1,908 colorectal cancers, and 376 kidney cancers. We used Cox proportional hazards models to estimate the association of quintiles of the five measures with risk of the four cancers.

Results

Unlike the other anthropometric indices, ABSI was not associated with increased risk of breast or endometrial cancer. BMI and WC were comparable as predictors of breast and endometrial cancer, and these associations were unchanged after mutual adjustment. For colorectal and kidney cancers, ABSI was a significant predictor comparable to BMI; however, WC showed the strongest association with colorectal cancer, and WC, WHtR, and WHR all showed stronger associations with kidney cancer.

Conclusion

In contrast to other anthropometric measures, ABSI showed no association with risk of breast or endometrial cancer and was more weakly associated with risk of colorectal and kidney cancers compared to more established measures of central adiposity.

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Change history

  • 27 July 2017

    An erratum to this article has been published.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was supported through institutional funds from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Conflict of interest

None of the authors has a conflict of interest.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1300 Morris Park Avenue, Bronx, NY, 10461, USA

    Geoffrey C. Kabat, Xiaonan Xue, Victor Kamensky, Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller & Thomas E. Rohan

  2. Department of Preventive Medicine, School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    Dorothy Lane

  3. Department of Medicine, Arizona Cancer Center, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Jennifer W. Bea

  4. Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA

    Chu Chen

  5. Department of Public Health Sciences, School of Medicine, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Lihong Qi

  6. Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Marcia L. Stefanick

  7. Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, CA, USA

    Rowan T. Chlebowski

  8. Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, School of Public Health and Health Professions, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Jean Wactawski-Wende

Authors
  1. Geoffrey C. Kabat
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  2. Xiaonan Xue
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  4. Dorothy Lane
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  9. Rowan T. Chlebowski
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  10. Jean Wactawski-Wende
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  11. Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Geoffrey C. Kabat.

Additional information

An erratum to this article is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-017-0931-x.

Appendix: Short list of WHI investigators

Appendix: Short list of WHI investigators

Program Office: (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Bethesda, Maryland) Jacques Rossouw, Shari Ludlam, Dale Burwen, Joan McGowan, Leslie Ford, and Nancy Geller

Clinical Coordinating Center: Clinical Coordinating Center: (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA) Garnet Anderson, Ross Prentice, Andrea LaCroix, and Charles Kooperberg

Investigators and Academic Centers: (Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA) JoAnn E. Manson; (MedStar Health Research Institute/Howard University, Washington, DC) Barbara V. Howard; (Stanford Prevention Research Center, Stanford, CA) Marcia L. Stefanick; (The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH) Rebecca Jackson; (University of Arizona, Tucson/Phoenix, AZ) Cynthia A. Thomson; (University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY) Jean Wactawski-Wende; (University of Florida, Gainesville/Jacksonville, FL) Marian Limacher; (University of Iowa, Iowa City/Davenport, IA) Robert Wallace; (University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA) Lewis Kuller; (Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC) Sally Shumaker

Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study: (Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC) Sally Shumaker

For a list of all the investigators who have contributed to WHI science, please visit: https://cleo.whi.org/researchers/SitePages/Write%20a%20Paper.aspx

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Kabat, G.C., Xue, X., Kamensky, V. et al. Risk of breast, endometrial, colorectal, and renal cancers in postmenopausal women in association with a body shape index and other anthropometric measures. Cancer Causes Control 26, 219–229 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-014-0501-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-014-0501-4

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