Breast cancer shares many epidemiological, lifestyle, and local hormonal and metabolic underpinnings with endometrial and ovarian cancer: a narrative review.

Background and objective: Breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancers (OCs) are significant public health concerns. Approximately three million patients are diagnosed with one of the three tumor types annually. The three tumor types exhibit related epidemiological trends, lifestyle risk factors, and tumor-specific characteristics which may influence their incidence and outcomes. While the majority of the literature examining hormone dependence of cancer appropriately is centered around breast cancer (BC), insufficient attention has been paid to how lessons from the biology of endometrial and OC may inform what we know about the biology of BC and vice versa. This narrative review seeks to address that unmet need.

Methods: The construction of this narrative review involved searching PubMed in April and July 2024 for manuscripts related to breast cancer metabolism, ovarian cancer metabolism, and endometrial cancer metabolism. Only manuscripts written in English were considered.

Key content and findings: This narrative review discusses epidemiologic, systemic, and local factors that may affect breast, endometrial, and OC. Simultaneously analyzing these three tumors offers an opportunity to gain unifying insights into reproductive hormone-dependent cancer biology; unfortunately, the field lacks studies directly comparing the impact of the aforementioned factors on these three tumor types. Therefore, we are limited to comparing the impact of similar systemic factors on tumor progression in each tumor type.

Conclusions: There is some convergence of systemic metabolic changes, particularly with regard to factors associated with obesity, on the biology of breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancer. However, future research is needed in order to clarify the convergent-or potentially divergent-mechanism(s) by which obesity affects breast, endometrial and OC.