African-American (Photo : REUTERS/Tim Shaffer)
Obese black men run a greater risk of getting prostate cancer than their white counterparts, new study into the matter revealed. What should be even more worrying is that it is the aggressive form of cancer that the African-American community seem to be more prone to be getting afflicted with.
What has come as a surprise to the researchers is that obesity, on the other hand, can in fact reduce the risk of slow moving cancer for non-Hispanic white though slightly increases chances of aggressive cancer.
Black men with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 35 or more are 122 percent more prone to have low grade prostate cancer and 81 percent higher risk of aggressive cancer compared to their healthy counterparts. For black men, a BMI of 25 or lower is considered to be normal and healthy.
Similar figures for white men is 20 percent reduced chances of slow moving cancer and 33 percent higher risk of fast moving cancer for those who are obese.
The report which has been published in the April 16 edition of JAMA Oncology can be considered to the first comprehensive study of prostate cancer taking into account the age and race of the individual.
The research team is led by Alan Kristal, who is a member of the Fred Hutch Public Health Sciences Division, and Wendy Barrington, affiliate public health investigator at Fred Hutch and an assistant professor at the University Of Washington School Of Nursing, according to Science Daily.
Researchers though haven't been able to explain the findings stating they need to dig deeper into the facts and figures to come up with a credible explanation.
According to Barrington, social disadvantage for the blacks in the US such as lack of access to certain resources as well as other inherent biological factors could be the reason the African-American community has a higher risk of prostate cancer in the US, Reuters stated.
The study was undertaken by the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial to determine if either of the two had any effect on cancer. The study covered more than 35,000 individual from the US, Canada and Puerto Rico including some 3,400 African-American men. While the study failed to establish a link between either of the two substances and a reduced risk of prostate cancer, the data collected did throw up interesting facts concerning ethnicity and the particular form of cancer.
