Letter to the editor on ‘Body mass index and 20-specific cancers—re-analyses of dose-response meta-analyses of observational studies’

In a recently published paper in theAnnals of Oncology [1], Choi et al. evaluated the strength of the evidence in the literature for the association between body mass index and 20 cancers in a manner that resembles our umbrella review on the same topic [2]. We were surprised to see that there were many discrepancies between the two assessments. The current paper used a grading scheme consisting of similar criteria used in our umbrella review, but structured the grading differently without providing a justification for this choice. Our umbrella review used a grading scheme that has been extensively applied and justified in previous studies [3], and the results for adiposity and cancer in our study were consistent with previous assessments by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) (Table1) [4,5]. We feel that the authors ’ choice of grading scheme fails to correctly classify the evidence. Associations between adiposity and risk of postmenopausal breast, colon, gallbladder, gastric, liver, ovarian and thyroid cancers received weak or not significant evidence grades in the current paper in contrast to convincing evi dence grades received in the previous reports [2,4,5]. Table 1Strength of the evidence for the association of adiposity and cancer as evaluated by different organizations/investigatorsTypeChoi et al.IARCWCRF 2017Kyrgiou et al.Breast cancer, premenopausalWeakNAProbable decreased riskSuggestiveBreast cancer, po...
Source: Annals of Oncology - Category: Cancer & Oncology Source Type: research