ARTICLES
Obesity Increases the Prostate Cancer Death Risk
Obese men suffering from prostate cancer are two-and-a-half times
more likely to die from it compared to normal-weight men, according
to a recent study from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
The study involved almost eight hundred middle-aged men who were
recently diagnosed with prostate-cancer, and followed the subjects
for ten years. Seventeen percent of the subjects were obese and six
percent of them died of prostate-cancer.
The mortality risk from prostate cancer for obese men is not related
to the treatment, or prostate cancer stage at the time of the study,
said Dr. Alan Kristal, senior author of the study. The risk for obese
men is of 2.6 times greater compared to healthy weight men, regardless
of the cancer diagnostic profile.
The results of the study are not related to whether the patient
is subjected to radiation treatment, radical prostatectomy, or androgen-deprivation
therapy. It does not matter if the subject suffers from a high grade
cancer, or low-grade, localized, distant, or regional cancer, says
Kristal.
Particularly, men with regional or local prostate-cancer have a
3.6-time higher risk of metastasis, or cancer spreading to other
organs, than patients with a healthy weight.
Obesity was strongly connected with prostate cancer especially for
men with regional disease, meaning cancer that has already started
to spread to surrounding tissues, compared to those with early cancer.
Researchers believe that inflammation and steroid hormones are behind
the connection between prostate-cancer and obesity. Obesity is considered
a massive inflammatory condition, which modifies the levels of serum
estrogens and increases factors that lead to cancer growth, according
to Kristal. |