Inflammatory talk: linking obesity, NF-κB, and Aromatase.

Obesity is associated with increased risk and worsened prognosis for postmenopausal breast cancer, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Elegant work reported by Subbaramaiah and colleagues in this issue of the journal (beginning on page 329) adds important insights, particularly into the connections between obesity, inflammation, and aromatase via cross-talk among adipocytes, macrophages, and epithelial cells. This work provides several new molecular targets and strategies to test in model systems for preventing or controlling obesity-related breast cancer and provides a framework for studying the linkages among the complex mechanistic pathways underlying the obesity-cancer relationship.