A new study finds that patients hospitalized or having surgery for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) appear to be at higher risk for developing prostate cancer.
The results show that men who were hospitalized for BPH had double the risk of developing prostate cancer as those in the general population
According to a study released over the weekend, male patients hospitalized for symptoms of BPH show a higher overall risk of developing prostate cancer.
The study, which utilized a large Danish database, focused exclusively on male hospitalization data between 1980 through 2006, a period in which 187,591 men were hospitalized for the BPH condition. Researchers reportedly compared their risk for developing prostate cancer against 2,770,300 men in the general population without BPH.
Examining over 3 million male cases between the 27 year period, the study found nearly 16,212 men who were previously hospitalized for BPH developed prostate cancer, compared to 35,139 people who were not hospitalized for BPH and later developed prostate cancer.
“We found there was also a doubling of a risk of prostate cancer death in men who were hospitalized for [BPH],” said Stig Bojesen, MD, of Copenhagen University Hospital, Herlev, Denmark. “We found that if a men underwent medicine for [BPH], a risk of prostate cancer genocide was increasing scarcely 8 times that of a ubiquitous population.”
The results from the study follow the release of a number of studies aim at examining prostate cancer. A separate study released over the weekend finds that U.S. men who have surgery for prostate cancer seem to fare better if they have private insurance rather than public coverage through Medicare or Medicaid.
Another study released over the weekend finds that high calcium intake causes prostate cancer among African-American men.
Researchers note that the correlation between BHP and the risk of prostate cancer has a long history. The study notes the “possible” association between to hospitalization for BPH and developing prostate cancer has been the center of debate for years.
“Benign prostatic hyperplasia and prostate cancer and the most common prostatic conditions with a large number of incident and prevalent cases each year. A possible association has been debated for several years but previous studies have generated ambiguous results,” researchers noted. The study notes that several previous studies have not shown any association between BPH and prostate cancer, while others had predicted the outcome.
Prostate cancer is the third most common cause of death from cancer in men of all ages and is the most common cause of death from cancer in men over age 75. Prostate cancer is rarely found in men younger than 40. Rates of detection of prostate cancers vary widely across the world, with South and East Asia detecting less frequently than in Europe, and especially the United States. In the U.S., prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed non-skin cancer.
The study was presented at the European Multidisciplinary Cancer Conference, formerly known as the Congress of the European Cancer Organizations and Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ECCO-ESMO).
