Smoking tied to more aggressive prostate cancer

If you’re a smoker looking for another reason to quit, consider this: in addition to raising your risk of heart and lung disease, as well as cancers of the bladder and kidney, smoking could boost the odds that you will develop aggressive prostate cancer that metastasizes, or spreads through your body. That’s according to research published by an Austrian team in 2018. The evidence connecting tobacco use with prostate cancer (which tends to grow relatively slowly) isn’t as strong as it is for other smoking-related diseases. Researchers first detected the link only after pooling data from 51 studies that enrolled over four million men. Published in 2014, this earlier research showed that smokers have a 24% higher risk of death from prostate cancer than nonsmokers, but it left an open question: did the men who died from these other causes also have high-grade prostate cancers that had not yet been detected? Experts suspected that since smoking kills in different ways, some of those who pick up the habit simply may not live long enough to die from prostate cancer. To investigate, the Austrian researchers limited their analysis to just over 22,000 men who had recently been treated surgically for prostate cancer, but were otherwise healthy. This was a smart move. By focusing on prostate cancer patients instead of just smokers and nonsmokers, they excluded the men who were at higher risk of death from competing causes. After roughly six years of follow-up, the data told a clea...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Prostate Knowledge Risks and Prevention HPK Source Type: blogs