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Page 1 of 2  Here’s another reason for men to drop a shipload of weight:
Too much junk in the trunk may cause results of a man’s PSA blood test—a tool for helping doctors diagnose cancer—to come back inaccurate, which may mean a large number of cancer cases are being missed, according to the latest Johns Hopkins Prostate Bulletin and the journal Urology. The findings should also get men thinking not just about their weights and eating habits for heart health, but also for prostate health. "I am an optimist and I believe people want to take control of their health,” says Dr. Stephen Freedland of Duke University in Durham, N.C., who helped with the study. “Weight loss and exercise are two things patients can do on their own to really take control of their cancer and health. We tell patients to exercise three or four times a week, eat a healthier diet, high in vegetables and fruits, and keep getting screened." The findings also could affect the reliability of blood tests for other cancers and diseases, Freedland warns.
More fat, more blood? Using results from a man’s PSA test, doctors can predict his chances of having prostate cancer or a benign condition, such as prostate enlargement or infection. When a man’s prostate gets kooky, the gland at the base of the bladder pumps out more PSA into the blood—and generally the more PSA in the blood, the higher the cancer risk. If a man is extremely overweight, then the blood test will show a lower—and incorrect—amount of PSA in the blood. In other words, the doctors can get fooled by the results, and thus not order additional tests, such as prostate biopsies, physical exams and ultrasound imaging of the gland. But too much body fat also even throw those results, researchers warn. According to the study, which involved more than 14,000 prostate cancer patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital and other healthcare facilities, the extra blood volume produced in extremely overweight men may so dilute levels of "prostate specific antigen"—PSA, in other words—produced by the prostate may make the blood test significantly less effective at diagnosing cancer. Dr. Alan Partin, chief urologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, says researchers believe that obese men may make less PSA because they tend to have less testosterone, the sex hormone that prompts PSA production and fuels prostate cancer. But another theory is obese men just may have more blood, which thins out the concentration of PSA in the blood, he adds. The latest results back up a research project last year that showed mildly obese men’s PSA scores were 14 percent lower than scores for normal-weight men, but moderately and severe obese men had PSA values that were 29 percent lower, says Marva Price, a registered nurse at Duke’s Comprehensive Cancer Center and Prostate Center. Does your job affect your cancer risk? Maybe I shouldn’t have toiled as a reporter and editor behind a desk all day for more than 30 years. Here’s why: a job that requires moving around constantly and pushing your physical boundaries may lower your risk of developing prostate cancer. UCLA researchers say they’ve linked prostate cancer and physical activity after studying men working at Southern California aerospace engine and nuclear power plants. Dr. Anusha Krishnadasan and his team found that the odds for prostate cancer among highly active aerospace workers were 45 percent lower than those for less active coworkers, according to an article in Cancer Causes Control, a medical journal. However, they found no significant difference in the odds among workers of various physical activity levels at nuclear power plants. Krishnadasan says he guesses that continuous physical activity is better at lowering your odds for prostate cancer than intermittent activity, such as that exhibited by the employees at the nuclear power plant. The aerospace men in the study were mechanics, technicians, welders, assemblers and machinists whose jobs required that they stay on the move constantly. However, only a third of the nuclear power workers kept up such activity and another third were cops, firemen and electricians who moved around every now and then.
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