Obesity will soon outscore smoking as the principal risk factor in Germany for cancer, the head of the country's main cancer-research laboratory said on December 29. The reason was the growth in Germany's obesity rate. Overweight people are at greater risk of oesophageal, bowel, kidney, pancreatic and breast cancer, although the precise mechanisms involved have still not yet been fully explained.
"That's an important topic in the next stage of our research," said Otmar Wiestler, head of the German Cancer Research Centre, or DKFZ, told the German Press Agency dpa in Heidelberg.
He said the overall number of cancer cases was bound to rise as the average person's life expectancy grew in Germany.
"Cancers are diseases that mainly show up in old age," he explained.
Professor Wiestler said that of 450,000 people who come down with cancer in Germany every year, about half could expect to be cured and many others could expect therapy that kept the cancer in check.
New drugs and the trend to carefully tailor therapies to the individual promised to increase the rate of cures, he said.
DKFZ in Heidelberg says it is the largest biomedical research institute in Germany with more than 2,200 staff.
"Cure rates will improve," he forecast, adding that scientists "now have a fairly good for the majority of cancers" which genetic mutations and which cellular changes are involved.
"That makes it possible to devise drugs that block such changes. There are more and more drugs that can be prescribed individually, depending on the characteristics of the patient," he said. Single forms of cancer can be of many types, needing different drugs.
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