In a presentation titled “Endometrial cancer and obesity trends in the United States in the 21st century,” UCI Health researchers calculated a 137% increase in endometrial adenocarcinoma among women ages 20 to 29 and a 71% increase among women ages 30 to 39 since 2001. The findings are based on data for more than 580,000 U.S. cases of endometrial adenocarcinoma collected over the last two decades.
Over the same period, obesity rates increased 7.5% a year among women ages 20 to 29, and 4.5% annually among the 30 to 39 age group, said lead author Dr. Alex A. Francoeur, a gynecologic oncology fellow at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. The lead corresponding author is Dr. Robert E. Bristow, the Philip J. Di Saia Chair in Gynecologic Oncology and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the UC Irvine School of Medicine.
“This represents a public health emergency,” said Francoeur, who called for an awareness campaign to educate women and the general public about the risk obesity poses for developing endometrial cancer, the sixth most common cancer in women and one that is expected to claim more than 13,000 U.S. lives in 2024.
Good morning. I'm Chris Tawa. I'm a gynecologic oncologist at the University of California Irvine. And I'm here on June 1st Saturday morning for the 2024 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Joining me today is Dr Alex Franco, also from UC Irvine. Hi, I'm one of the first year Gyn oncology fellows at UC Irvine. And I'm excited to be here at my first Asco meeting, um where I'll be presenting an oral presentation tomorrow morning. That, that's fantastic. Doctor Franco. Um It, I know it, for example, it took me 11 years after I finished training to have an oral presentation at AS O and here you've done it in your first year of fellowship. Uh Tell us what it's about. Well, I couldn't have done it without my great mentors at UC Irvine, including Dr TUI and Doctor Bristow. My project is called endometrial cancer trends and obesity trends in the 21st century in the United States. And it was a large retrospective study that we conducted um over the past 35 years looking at um how endometrial cancer incidents and obesity incidents um in the United States has. Um kind of temporarily mirrored each other. Um, and I can discuss a little bit more what we found. So where exactly do we stand with management of endometrial cancer today? I mean, what advances have we had surgically and in terms of therapeutics? Yeah. So, you know, endometrial cancer is usually diagnosed at an early stage thankfully where it can be cured with surgery. Um, but uh, more advanced disease requires a complex management with radiation surgery, chemotherapy and targeted agents. We've made a lot of advances with advanced stage endometrial cancer, um with immunotherapies and checkpoint inhibitors and in early stage endometrial cancer, um we made a lot of progress in fertility preserving treatment. Um as we are seeing younger reproductive age, women develop the disease and we've been able to help them um preserve their ability to have Children in the future. Um with conservative measures. Yeah, I'd agree with that, you know, with um early stage cancers, we can manage it with hormones and let um patients um go on and conceive. What was the impetus for your study that you're presenting at as o this year? Yeah. So, you know, obesity has always been linked with endometrial cancer. Um you know, historically kind of the historic type one endometrioid, adenocarcinoma subtype and, but there's not been a great study like that's been done temporarily looking at trends in endometrial cancer and obesity. So, the goal of this study was to perform like an ecological analysis over time of endometrial cancer and obesity. And we were able to use um two large databases from the United States to do that. And what we found was that endometrial adenocarcinoma rates are rising to the fastest in young reproductive age women. And these trends are disproportionately affecting minority patients in the United States such as Black and Hispanic women. And when we look at obesity trends, we see a a mirror in that finding where rates of obesity are rising also in younger age groups at the highest rate. And we see the highest incidence and disproportionate incidence of obesity in minority populations as well. We then to further that analysis performed a correlation analysis between the two data sets and found them to be very strongly correlated. Well, we can't say definitively since they are not linked data sets that this correlation is positive, we feel that these findings are very strong to suggest a very compelling relationship between these two trends. And that obesity really represents a public health crisis in the United States in regard to more than just cardiovascular disease. But women's health cancer and reproductive future, I think that's gonna be remarkable. I'm really looking forward to hearing your presentation. Endometrial cancer is the most common gynecologic cancer um that's encountered in the United States. And I think one of the things that I'm looking forward to in addition to your um your discussion when you present tomorrow is there's a complementary study that um, goes really well with your, um, analysis which is looking at endometrial cancer in women treated, um, conservatively with hormones and it's actually shows that the survival rate is decreased in women. Um, 40 years old and up. And so I think your paper and one that I'm looking forward to hearing are two very nice papers that are gonna shed a lot of light on this disease. Yeah, I'm excited to see the gynecology oral session tomorrow. There'll be some great topics. Well, please stop by the UC I Booth. Um, we're here at 11041. and thank you very much.
