Practical Practitioner
By: Pamela Egan, FNP-C CDE
Obesity may make prostate cancer more aggressive
Obesity may affect the aggressiveness of prostate cancer, according to a new study by researchers at Naval Medical Center’s Department of Urology in San Diego.
The new study found that obese men with prostate cancer are more likely than normal weight men to have aggressive tumors and to experience cancer recurrence after surgery.
Obesity was also associated with higher recurrence rates than in those who are not overweight.
Although more research is needed, these findings suggest that men may be able to modify their risk of aggressive prostate cancer by maintaining a healthy weight.
The primary role of obesity in prostate cancer is still unclear, but it appears to induce the development of more aggressive tumors.
Patients are advised to maintain a normal body weight to limit the possibility that they would develop clinically significant more aggressive prostate tumors.
The study was designed to examine the relationship between obesity and prostate cancer recurrence in large samples of men with localized prostate cancer who had undergone a radical prostatectomy. The study included 3,162 patients with prostate cancer. Of these patients, 19 percent were obese.
For the purposes of this study, obesity was defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher.
In addition to obesity-related effects, some racial differences were seen in terms of prostate cancer outcome. Although obesity rates in the general adult population in the United States are similar between black and white men, black men in the study were more likely to be obese. Black men were also more likely to have higher cancer recurrence rates and have more aggressive prostate cancer.
The researchers said this may explain why black men with prostate cancer generally have more aggressive tumors and worse outcomes compared with white men. But most researchers believe that the worse outcomes among black men with prostate cancer are related to obesity rather than race. BMI may account, at least in part, for the racial differences in prostate risk.
These findings support the hypothesis that obesity is associated with the progression of latent to clinically significant prostate cancer.
Of interest to the women in the group, obesity is also associated with the progression of breast cancer and ovarian cancer. In these cases, the fat cells release hormones that aggravate the cancer.
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