Holocaust survivors have a risk of cancer two to three times that of European Jews who arrived in Israel before or during the war, Israeli researchers say.

Dr. Micha Barchana, part of the team at the University of Haifa that conducted the survey, said living on short rations, as little as 200 to 800 calories a day, may be the cause, CNN reported. He said the limited diet may have been especially damaging for those who were children.

"We know that people who went through the Holocaust suffered severe calorie restriction," he said.

Many Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe were either in concentration camps or hiding. Betty Potash Gold, now 79, and her family survived by concealing themselves in a bunker in their village in eastern Poland in 1942, surviving on scraps of garbage.

The researchers compared 300,000 Jews who left Europe before the end of the war with thousands who were still in Europe when the war ended. They found men in the second group were 3.5 times as likely to get cancer and women 2.33 times as likely.

The study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in the United States.