But the JAMA study also suggests that it’s never too late to drop pounds. Non-hormone users who maintained a weight loss of at least 22 pounds after menopause lowered their breast-cancer risk by 60 percent compared with women who didn’t take weight off. This is actually encouraging news, says lead researcher Heather Eliassen, an instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “We have identified many risk factors for breast cancer,” she says, “but most of them are not easy to modify. Weight is one of the few risk factors that you actually can change.”
