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 Like many other cancers, prostate cancer is a disease of risks. In other words, you’re at high risk of getting it if you have an immediate relative—father, brother, uncle—who's had prostate cancer. My grandfather died of it, so I was screwed genetically from the second I was born. Sure enough, doctors found a tumor hidden in the shadows of my prostate five years ago.
In addition to this "run in the family" stuff, you’re also at higher risk for prostate cancer if you’re African American. Unfortunately, blacks are typically diagnosed with prostate cancer more frequently and later—when the cancer is at an advanced stage and more aggressive—than any other racial and ethnic group in the United States.
Now, researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans may have shed light on the burden faced by black men by discovering biological markers involved in the growth of prostate tumor cells.
With funding from the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society, Tulane molecular oncologist Asim B. Abdel-Mageed compared prostate cancer cells from 50 black and white men 50 to 60. Using sophisticated DNA genetic screening techniques, he found two proteins in the African-American men were overproduced in 90 percent of the cells, far higher than levels in white men.
Proteins and testosterone
Abdel-Mageed says finding some way to measure the amount of two proteins in a black man’s blood would help doctors detect the cancer much earlier, before it grows more aggressive and begins to spread.
The proteins are somehow involved in the relationship between hormones and the progression of prostate cancer. For instance, one protein binds to and activities the “androgen receptor” that allows the male hormone testosterone to activate genes and influence the growth of prostate cancer, the scientist says.
Abdel-Mageed appeared recently at a conference sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research that focused on health disparities in racial and ethnic minorities. What about high-carb diets?
For the past gadzillion years, doctors, nutritionists and dietitians have told us that what we shove in our mouths have everything to do with the state of our health. Now, they have more distressing news: high-carb diets may lead to bigger—and deadlier—prostate cancers.
Lab rats dining on high-carb diets dripping in the sugars dextrin and sucrose suffered prostate tumors that were 45 percent bigger than the tumors in mice kept on low-carb meals, Canadian researchers say in the latest Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
What's more, the high-carb critters also gained 15 percent more weight, largely from a buildup of insulin in the blood and insulin-like growth factor, a protein that spurs the growth of cells.
Although done in lab rats, the research may hold clues as to how diets that reduce insulin levels affect prostate cancer patients, says Vasundara Venkateswaran, the lead researcher at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
Another team of researchers said in early November that they found a no-carb diet might slow the growth of prostate cancer in mice.
But as with most studies, it’s stay tuned: don’t ditch your carbs, which are major components of healthy diets in humans, Venkateswaran says. Besides more research is needed to nail down the findings in mice, which may not translate into affecting prostate cancer tumors in men.
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