Benjamin Chung

M.D, M.S.

Stanford University

Associate Professor

PLCO (Learn more about this study)

PLCO-896

Jan 18, 2022

BMI and the risk of renal cell carcinoma : a case control study

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC), or kidney cancer, creates a significant impact not only in the United States, but worldwide and the incidence rate is continuing to rise. The understanding of etiologic factors causing RCC is poorly understood and incomplete, leading to lack of ability from a preventative standpoint, especially in light of both an aging population and an increasing number of younger patients diagnosed with RCC. In light of our frustratingly incomplete knowledge, our aim is to shed additional light on the risk of elevated BMI which has been implicated in the pathogenesis of RCC. As the PLCO dataset has granular information about BMI and specific BMI trends in individual patients, we plan to further explore these correlations, which to our knowledge, have not been reported on previously in the PLCO dataset. The renal dataset appears to be the dataset most relevant to this research study.

In addition, ten evidence-based cancer prevention recommendations including BMI were proposed by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) and American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) in 2018 focused on modifiable risk factors that impact the risk of cancers. To the best of our knowledge, little is known about the role of adherence to WCRF/AICR recommendations on the risk of developing renal cancer in the US adult population. Therefore, we aimed to examine the association between full adherence to the 2018 WCRF/AICR recommendations and the independent impact of BMI on the adherence score and the risk of developing renal cancer in the PLCO cohort.