Analysis of a South African Accredited Cancer Centre - Suspected Correlation between BMI and Biology

The Breast Care Center of Excellence Johannesburg, South Africa, has been undergoing database reviews as part of its accreditation procedure since 2016; this has driven a number of research questions to arise due to database correlations. Since the drive to personalised oncology and the treatment of cancer subtypes based on the biology of cancer, the ability to search for correlations between presented biology and the associated causes of such biology rising has become possible.

Analysis of the complete database from 2016 to 2022 showed a number of patients having complete medical workups included in the initial clerk, including their body mass index (BMI); this data was correlated to their pathologically determined biology (LumA, LumB, Her2, TripNeg) and each subgroup was compared to the normal distribution of BMI based on the local population range. Further, Pearson's R assessment was performed to determine the degree of variation between these groups and the control, and the statistical significance of this variation was done via chi-squared analysis.

For the Groups of Luminal A and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), the deviation from the statistical norm came in at less than 5%, showing that there is no significant relationship between these cancer biological subtypes and the expected normal distribution. However, for both the HER2 groups and the Luminal B group, there was a significant deviation from normative distribution, around 30% deviation towards larger BMI in the HER2 group and a 45% deviation in the Luminal B group; this incredibly large deviation shows that with a p-value of 0.05, the majority of a greater majority of Luminal B patients would fall into the category of overweight to Obese that not, and this deviates from the population norm at a rate exceeding 1 in three patients.

Large studies to assess the correlation between BMI and biology are required to confirm this observation; internally, this assessment with be included as a prospective review with all patients' BMI and Biology being recorded. This will prompt the assessment of the impact of hormone-sensitive cancers and their prevalence, including additional risk factors such as BMI.