Choi JB, et al. – In this study involving over 11 million men without a previous bladder cancer diagnosis who had at least one health exam from 2009 to 2012 and were followed up until December 2015, researchers evaluated the impact of abdominal obesity on the risk of developing bladder cancer as per body mass index (BMI) using National Health Insurance System (NHIS) data. They observed significant positive trends in the risk of bladder cancer with increasing BMI or waist circumference (WC). The link between BMI and bladder cancer was affected by the presence of abdominal obesity. Among individuals with a WC < 90 cm, there was no significant change in the HRs for bladder cancer development beyond the reference BMI. Conversely, the HRs for bladder cancer demonstrated statistically significant increase as the BMI increased beyond the reference BMI among individuals with WC ≥ 90 cm. Overall, increasing BMI and increasing WC were found to be risk factors for bladder cancer in men, which were independent of confounding variables.