Obesity Cancer Warning
Obese women in Leeds are 40% more likely to get cancer. That's according to Cancer Research UK today, the charity says being overweight enough to classify as having obesity can lead to a higher chance of at least 7 cancers: bowel, post-menopausal breast, gallbladder, womb, kidney, pancreatic and oesophageal cancers.
Official figures show 28% of women in Yorkshire are obese.
Nicki Embleton, Cancer Research UK spokesperson for Yorkshire, said: "Losing weight isn’t easy, but women don’t have to join a gym and run miles every day or give up their favourite food forever. "Just making small changes that can be maintained in the long term can have a real impact."
It comes on the day that researchers working at the University of Leeds say they may have made a breathrough in treated kidney cancer.
They've found a chemical in a plant that grows in Africa which targets ONLY diseased cells in patients with renal cancer - and hope with more work the Spurred Phyllanthus (phyllanthus engleri) can be developed into a drug. Hannah Gaunt is a PhD student on the team in Leeds, "It's the seventh most common cancer and there are 10,000 cases of renal cancer diagnosed each year so it really is a devastating disease and currently there's a real lack of treatements for this disease. However Engerlin A has been found to specifically target renal cancer tumors so it doesn't kill the healthy renal cancer cells, or other cells in the body." "Current chemotherapy drugs sometimes they do work, however they also act on other healthy tissues - that's why everyone gets such bad side effects from chemotherapy. Though she's urging patience and caution about today's announcement, "We are only testing in the lab, we haven't actually gone into clinicial trials with patients, however this is a really exciting finding. We have secured a grand and so this should ensure we are able to develop a drug that can target renal cancer in 3 to 5 years. "Clinical trials are expensive, so the next stage will be to take this through to clinical trials but we have to develop a safe and effective drug that can be used in humans first."