Q&A: Dr. Ken Batai, 2025 KCA Grant Winner
Dr. Ken Batai received a 2025 KCA Interdisciplinary Medicine Focus Award in partnership with the Michael and Ina Korek Foundation for research on the “Investigation of the relationship between weight history and abdominal adiposity and their influence on survival”. Dr. Batai is a researcher at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. We spoke about his research and the impact it can have on people with kidney cancer.
Briefly describe your project.
The objectives of our study are to understand the relationships between two modifiable risk factors (weight history and abdominal adiposity) and survival outcomes and to explore other modifiable risk factors, such as physical activity and smoking history, influencing the relationships between weight history, adiposity, and survival outcomes.
To achieve these objectives, we will use self-reported height and weight at age 18, 30, 45, and 60 to assess weight history and pre-diagnostic CT scans for three-dimensional measurements of visceral, subcutaneous, and intermuscular adiposity tissue and perinephric fat, a particular visceral adipose tissue surrounding the kidneys. Then, we will assess associations of weight history and adiposity measurement with survival outcomes. We will also assess whether patients are physically active or have smoked (or currently smoke) affect these relationships.
Do you think your findings might be better for prevention or for long-term survivorship?
Our long-term goal is to use weight history and three-dimensional measurements of adiposity to identify high-risk patients for poor survival and to develop precision lifestyle intervention to improve survival and quality of life after diagnosis.
Understanding weight history is becoming increasingly important for prevention and clinical management of obesity-related diseases, and kidney cancer is one of them. However, the relationship between weight history before diagnosis and survival is not well understood. Understanding the impact of abdominal adiposity, including underlying risk factors influencing variation in abdominal adiposity, such as weight history and physical activities, on disease progression may help develop tailored disease management and survivorship care by increasing physical activities or improving diet.
What kind of next step or follow-on research questions do you think might come from your eventual findings?
We will need additional studies before weight history and adiposity measurements can be used for clinical recommendations and survivorship care. First, relationships between unintentional weight loss due to cancer diagnosis, sarcopenia (loss of muscle mass and function due to aging), and survival (or quality of life after diagnosis) remain important to investigate further, because these patients may also have reduced adiposity, but they often have poor outcomes. Second, investigating biological underpinnings of long-term exposure to excess weight and high adiposity may help understand heterogeneity of kidney cancer. Patients with long-term exposure to excess weight and high adiposity may have very different tumors from patients with healthy weight or patients who experienced unintentional weight loss. Third, diet and physical activity intervention strategies need to be developed based on the information generated in our current and future studies, and the developed interventions need to be tested to improve survival and quality of life after diagnosis.
Dr. Ken Batai was a guest on a recent episode of the Kidney Cancer Unfiltered podcast to discuss how common kidney cancer is in Native American populations, where weight history can play a role. Watch or listen to the episode:
What is the most exciting thing about your research that patients and families can take away?
Maintaining healthy weight through physical activities and healthy diets should improve quality of life after diagnosis. This has been demonstrated for other cancer types, but only a few behavioral intervention studies have been conducted specifically for kidney cancer survivors. While our study does not test any diet and physical activity intervention in kidney cancer survivors, demonstrating lifestyle factors affecting survival in this study will be important evidence to support the importance of physical activities and healthy diets for kidney cancer survivors.
What motivates you?
I just love doing research. I love learning new things and solving questions through research. It is great through my research if I can do something good for people who have some challenges in their lives, particularly cancer patients and their family members. As a researcher, I do not directly interact with kidney cancer patients and families or provide care, but my goal is the same as clinicians. We want to help patients and their families.
My father is a cancer survivor and has diabetes, but he is healthy and strong. He takes walks for over an hour every day. He works in the garden almost every day in all seasons, whether it is very hot, cold, or rainy. He eats healthy (a lot of vegetables and lean meat and fish). This lifestyle gives him strength to undergo two surgeries and series of chemotherapy and to overcome COVID-19 and pneumonia during his treatments. He enjoys travelling, occasionally going out to eat, meeting friends, and attending community events. It seems like common sense. Healthy lifestyle improves quality of life among cancer survivors, but so many research projects are still necessary to improve clinical recommendations, attitudes in our society, and federal and state policies to incorporate physical activity and healthy diet into our lives and patient care on a routine basis. I hope my research project can be one of key studies for these changes to come.
What else do you want others to know about your research?
I believe prevention and behavioral science research like mine is as important as research on tumor biology and treatment development. Effectiveness of treatments may depend on the biology of tumors, but how well patients can tolerate treatments and recover after treatment depends on patients’ overall health. Weight history information and abdominal adiposity measurements should be able to identify patients who have a difficult time tolerating treatments or recovering after treatments. Effective physical activity and diet interventions may also slow the tumor growth and progression. Through my research, I hope to help patients improve their quality of life after treatments.