Visceral obesity may affect oncologic outcome in patients with colorectal cancer.
OBJECTIVE
Obesity is closely related to the development of colorectal cancer as well as other metabolic complications. We investigated the prognostic significance of visceral obesity and body mass index (BMI) in 161 resectable colorectal cancer patients.


METHODS
Ratios of visceral fat area (VFA) to subcutaneous fat area (SFA) were measured from the digital images of patients' computed tomography taken before the surgery, and patients were divided into those with high and those with low VFA/SFA ratio according to the degree of proportional visceral adiposity, and into an overweight and a normal-weight group according to their preoperative BMI.


RESULTS
The overweight group showed a borderline decrease in cumulative disease-free survival compared to the normal-weight group (P = 0.064). Patients with high VFA/SFA ratio (more than 50 percentiles) had significantly lower cumulative disease-free survival rate compared to patients with low VFA/SFA ratio (P = 0.008). BMI and visceral adiposity showed no influence on overall survival of patients.


CONCLUSIONS
Increased visceral adiposity was a significant predictor of disease-free survival in patients with resectable colorectal cancer. The prognostic significance of visceral adiposity should further be determined in a larger set of patients.
Moon
Hyeong-Gon
HG
Department of Surgery, School of Medicine, Gyeongsang National University Hospital, 90 Chilam-dong, Jinju, Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea. moonhgsurgi@hanmail.net
Ju
Young-Tae
YT
Jeong
Chi-Young
CY
Jung
Eun-Jung
EJ
Lee
Young-Joon
YJ
Hong
Soon-Chan
SC
Ha
Woo-Song
WS
Park
Soon-Tae
ST
Choi
Sang-Kyung
SK
D050154:Adiposity; D000368:Aged; D015992:Body Mass Index; D015179:Colorectal Neoplasms / Q000150:complications* / Q000401:mortality; D018572:Disease-Free Survival; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009765:Obesity / Q000150:complications*; D011379:Prognosis; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed