Study Suggests Meat, Dairy Raise Prostate Cancer Risk
Posted on: Tuesday, 7 October 2008, 13:05 CDT
Research suggests eating meat and dairy products may increase the risk of prostate cancer.
A heavy meat and dairy diet is believed to raise levels of a hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1), which promotes cell growth.
A team at the University of Oxford examined the results of 12 studies, featuring a total of nearly 9,000 men.
The team discovered that men with high blood levels of IGF-1 were up to 40% more likely to develop prostate cancer than those with low levels.
Experts say IGF-1 plays a key role in the growth and development of children and adolescents and in adults it continues to regulate cell growth and death, but it can also inhibit the death of cells that have come to the end of their natural life cycle.
The degree to which diet influences IGF-1 levels is still unclear, according to lead researcher Dr. Andrew Roddam.
However, levels could be up to 15% higher in people who ate a lot of meat and dairy products, he added.
"There is a need to identify risk factors for prostate cancer, especially those which can be targeted by therapy and/or lifestyle changes,” said Roddam.
"Now we know this factor is associated with the disease we can start to examine how diet and lifestyle factors can affect its levels and whether changes could reduce a man's risk."
Raised levels of IGF-1 were likely not only to increase the risk of developing prostate cancer, but also to aid the spread of tumors, Roddam said.
Research shows that cells fed IGF-1 grow much more quickly.
However, there was no evidence to suggest that measuring IGF-1 levels could be used to develop a new test to screen for prostate cancer, Roddam added.
More than 34,000 men in the UK are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year and around 10,000 die of the disease.
"While there are established risk factors associated with prostate cancer of age, family history, and ethnicity, there are no clear data on modifiable risk factors," said Dr. Lesley Walker, of the charity Cancer Research UK, which funded the study.
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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