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Dose response relationship between breast cancer and somatotypes during childhood: a systematic review and meta-analysis

British Journal of Cancer volume 129, pages 1432–1441 (2023)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Objectives

This study aims to evaluate the relationship between breast cancer and somatotypes during early life by meta-analysis and give the corresponding advice.

Methods

Observational studies till April 5, 2021, which explore women with/without breast cancer who used the Stunkard Figure Rating Scale/Sørensen Somatotypes to evaluate their somatotype before 18 years of age and distant breast cancer risk were included. Using random/fixed-effect models, the pooled relative risks (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated. Then a nonlinear dose–response meta-analysis was conducted using restricted cubic spline analysis.

Results

Six articles involving 15,211 breast cancer patients from 341,905 individuals were included for performing a meta-analysis of early somatotype and breast cancer risk. The pooled results showed that the protection became stronger with the increase of somatotype until it reached 6. The restricted cubic spline model indicated a linear relationship between somatotypes and breast cancer (P-nonlinearity = 0.533). Subgroup analysis of menopausal status showed that increasing somatotype during childhood was increasingly protective against postmenopausal breast cancer from somatotype 3 to somatotype 6, with a 0.887-fold (RR = 0.887, 95% CI: 0.842, 0.934) to 0.759-fold (RR = 0.759, 95% CI: 0.631, 0.913) decreased risk of breast cancer (P-nonlinearity = 0.880), but this association was not found in the population with premenopausal breast cancer (P-nonlinearity = 0.757). When stratified by age, among people younger than 10 years of age, an increase in somatotype was associated with a statistically significant reduction in breast cancer risk. From somatotype 3 to somatotype 6, the risk of breast cancer was reduced by 9.7–27.7% (P-nonlinearity = 0.175).

Conclusions

With early-life adiposity, our data support an inverse association with breast cancer risk, especially age less than 10 years and in postmenopausal women. Since girls with overweight likely remain overweight or even develop obesity in adulthood. While adults with overweight and obese are at increased risk of breast cancer and other types of cancer and various chronic diseases. Hence, we recommend that children should maintain a normal or slightly fat somatotype throughout all periods of life.

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Fig. 1: The figure shows the flow of information through the different phases our meta-analysis.
Fig. 2: Based on somatotype 1, the combined effects of other somatotypes and breast cancer were analyzed separately.
Fig. 3

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Data availability

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Health, Peking University Health Science Center, 38 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, 100191, Beijing, China

    Yuqi Dou, Botian Chen, Xue Yu & Defu Ma

  2. Shandong Academy of Occupational Health and Occupational Medicine, Shandong First Medical University & Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences, Taian, China

    Qinghua Xin

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Contributions

Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the work. Conceptualisation: DM and YD; methodology: DM and YD; software: YD; validation: DM; formal analysis: YD; investigation: YD, BC, XY and QX; resources: DM; data curation: DM; writing–original draft preparation: YD; writing—review and editing: DM; visualisation: YD and BC; supervision: DM; project administration: DM and YD; funding acquisition: DM. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. YD and DM participated in the design of this manuscript. YD, BC, XY, QX and DM participated in performing the research and statistical analysis. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Defu Ma.

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Dou, Y., Chen, B., Yu, X. et al. Dose response relationship between breast cancer and somatotypes during childhood: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Cancer 129, 1432–1441 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-023-02376-x

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