Vitamins and Prostate Cancer Risk

Prostate cancer is the second most type of non-cutaneous cancer in males.  While lung and bronchial cancer themselves account for 37% of cancer deaths in males, prostate, and colon cancer account for another 10%.

While in medical school, I first learned that prostate cancer is actually a slow-growing cancer.  As such, in some cases, men with prostate cancer can actually live long enough to die of other causes.  However, despite earlier detection with PSA and DRE screening exams, thousands of men die of prostate cancer each year.

In terms of nutrition, obesity is a strong risk factor for developing prostate cancer.  In short, obese men are more likely to die of prostate cancer.  Weight loss consequently may be one way for men to lower their risk of developing prostate cancer.

Important!  Some research suggests that a high intake of dietary fat and red meat may also increase your risk of developing prostate cancer. In fact, Asian men with low prostate cancer incidence and mortality in their birthplaces have significantly higher rates after migrating to Western countries.

Off-Topic:

One blog that I’ve read over the years, Health Habits, by Doug Robb, has fought the war against obesity one blog post at a time.  One of his recent posts discusses the role of the government in ‘curing’ obesity.  We can add prostate cancer to the long list of diseases that obesity increases the risk of including diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, high blood pressure, among others…

Vitamins and Risk of Prostate Cancer:

A very recent review focusing on the role of vitamins in prostate cancer prevention was published in the journal, Molecules, last month (Donkena et al, 2010).  Unfortunately, the end product of their review was not favorable in supporting the role of certain vitamins such as vitamin A, B, C, D, E, or folic acid at reducing the risk of developing prostate cancer.

Authors Conclusions:

“As discussed above, multiple studies showed the aforementioned vitamins have positive, negative or null effect on reducing PC risk. Even intervention studies can not absolutely determine if these vitamins have anti-PC efficacies.”

In short, the authors conceded that it is difficult to study the role of specific vitamins in preventing prostate cancer since there are too many factors involved.  Specifically, they note that other potential anti-cancer micronutrients coexist in our bodies.

In another related study (Venkitaraman et al, 2010), the authors concluded:

“No significant association was seen between serum levels of the micronutrients, antioxidants or vitamins and either adverse histology on repeat biopsy or PSA velocity. Our data do not support the hypothesis that high serum concentrations of micronutrients, antioxidants and vitamins prevent disease progression in men with localised prostate cancer.”

Conclusions:

At this point, there is no definitive evidence that certain vitamins or micronutrients may actually prevent prostate cancer.  However, it is a difficult to study the specific effects of individual vitamins given the complexity of trying to control for other related factors.

Though the evidence for vitamins in preventing prostate cancer is inconclusive, simply losing weight and limiting your intake of dietary fat would be a good start to potentially lowering your risk of developing prostate cancer.

References:

1. Donkena KV, Karnes RJ, Young CY.  Vitamins and prostate cancer risk.  Molecules. 2010 Mar 12;15(3):1762-83.
2. Venkitaraman R, Thomas K, Grace P, Dearnaley DP, Horwich A, Huddart RA, Parker CC.  Serum micronutrient and antioxidant levels at baseline and the natural history of men with localized prostate cancer on active surveillance.  Tumour Biol. 2010 Apr;31(2):97-102. Epub 2010 Feb 16.