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.

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