Being overweight or obese is well known to be associated with diabetes and cardiovascular disease, but the association between body weight and cancer risk is less clear, although a number of published studies have shown an association between increased body mass and the risk of some common cancers.

In a research Article, Andrew Renehan from the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues shed more light on this association. In a large meta-analysis pooling data for over 250,000 incidenct cases of cancer, they show how increased body weight is clearly associated with a number of cancers, including lesser-known cancers such as oesophageal and thyroid cancer.

A related Comment looks at the public-health implications of the new findings, commenting that awareness of increased body weight and cancer risk should be added to cancer guidelines.

The long Editorial praises the UK Wellcome Trust for its role in the funding of scientific and medical research, as increased funding of the institute is announced. We say how a focus on collaborative research by the Trust will have an even greater effect on the scientific community and of public health in the years to come.

Our Editor, Dr Richard Horton, writes about the UK national health service in the Comment section. He argues for a different approach, where instead of a national health service, we should instead view the NHS as a UK health system. And he calls for an independent technical panel to use a health-systems approach to inform the way health-care is delivered in the UK. 

In the World Report section, there are pieces about a proposal for supervised injecting clinics in the UK, and another piece concerning domestic violence against women in Nepal.

In Correspondence, appropriately, discussion of recent articles in the Lancet about the weight-loss drug ramonobant, and about surgery for obesity.

Back to research - we publish a study showing how immediate transfer to a medical centre that can do angioplasty for patients with ST elevated myocardial infahrction after thrombolysis is a safer strategy than a ‘wait and see’ policy after thrombolysis.

Also there is an important study showing how activated charcoal-often used as a treatment against self-poisoning in some countries, notably in rural Asia-is not effective in reducing mortality.

We also publish a related Review about the management of self-poisoning.

And finally - we conclude in print the maternal and child undernutrition series launched last month, and publish a related research Article from Haiti highlighting how a preventative strategy to provide food supplementation to very young infants is more effective than a recuperative approach given to children after they have become underweight.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 1:29 pm and is filed under The Lancet Digest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.