Increasing skirt sizes may hike your breast cancer risk

If you want to minimise your chances of developing breast cancer, staying the same skirt size over the years might help, a new study published in BMJ open suggests.

The study has shown that an increase of one size every 10 years between 25 and postmenopausal age (over 60) is associated with an increase of breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women by 33 percent

Needing a bigger skirt size reflects an increase in abdominal fat.  Thus, skirt size served as a proxy for abdominal weight gain. The investigators found it was a better predictor of risk than BMI — a ratio of weight to height — alone.

The exact mechanism between increased abdominal fat and higher breast cancer risk is not clear yet. But it is known that obesity increases the amount of estrogen in the body, which many breast cancers need to grow.