You hear a lot about obesity and how it increases the risk of heart disease. Lesser known is the fact that being overweight increases the risk of several types of cancer, including prostate cancer. Now new research suggests that weight gain may also make prostate cancer patients more than twice as like to have a reoccurrence.
In a study at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, researchers sent questionnaires to 1,337 men with prostate cancer who had undergone surgery to remove their prostate at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Each participant was asked to recall his diet, lifestyle and medical care from five years before their surgery and one year after. The results: Men whose weight increased more than five pounds during that time period had twice the rate of recurrence compared with men whose weight remained the same. On average, the study participants who gained, put on about 10 pounds. "We surveyed men whose cancer was confined to the prostate, and surgery should have cured most of them, yet some cancers recurred. Obesity and weight gain may be factors that tip the scale to recurrence," says Corinne Joshu, Ph.D., M.P.H., a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an author of the study.
Joshu warns that several confounding factorsincluding patients' ability to accurately recall their weight and lifestyle around the time of their surgerymay have had an impact in the studys results. Also, because PSA values, an indicator of recurrence, tend to be lower in obese men, physicians may be slower to detect their recurrent disease. "So, our study may be underestimating the risk of recurrent disease in these men," says Joshu.
