The lung cancer obesity paradox: An analysis of 432,924 patients.

Abstract

10578 Background: The lung cancer obesity paradox is the unexpected inverse relationship between body mass index (BMI) and lung cancer mortality. While there is a growing body of evidence to support the existence of the obesity paradox in lung cancer, little is known about its magnitude and relationship to cancer incidence and its impact on outcomes from surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiation treatment. Methods: To evaluate the impact of obesity on lung cancer incidence, we used TriNetX, a global federated health research network providing access to electronic medical records (diagnoses, procedures, medications, laboratory values, genomic information) from approximately 69 Million patients in 49 large Healthcare Organizations. We evaluated 2 patient cohorts of 216,462 adult smokers aged 18 to 75 that were matched for age, race, gender, and ethnicity. One cohort of patients carried a diagnosis of overweight and obesity (ICD-10 code E66), while the other cohort required exclusion of those diagnoses. Results: We found a statistically significant decrease in lung cancer incidence for patients with obesity (1.407% vs 2.039%, p < 0.0001), in addition to superior overall survival (95.344% vs 92.039%, p < 0.0001). A subset analysis of patients who contracted lung cancer showed a statistically significant benefit in median survival in favor of patients with overweight and obesity (851 vs 602 days, p value 0.0009). Conclusions: These findings support the existence of the obesity paradox in lung cancer, and its positive impact on both lung cancer incidence and outcome.