Tag Archives: male

Testosterone may contribute to colon cancer tumor growth

In his study, James Amos-Landgraf, an assistant professor of veterinary pathobiology in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, observed normal levels of naturally occurring colon cancer in a group of male rats. He then removed testosterone from those rats and colon cancer rates decreased dramatically. After reintroducing testosterone, the colon cancer rates returned to normal. “Previously, scientists believed that female hormones may have lent some sort of protection against tumor susceptibility,” Amos-Landgraf said…

Prostate cancer’s penchant for copper may be a fatal flaw

Researchers at Duke Medicine have found a way to kill prostate cancer cells by delivering a trove of copper along with a drug that selectively destroys the diseased cells brimming with the mineral, leaving non-cancer cells healthy. The combination approach, which uses two drugs already commercially available for other uses, could soon be tested in clinical trials among patients with late-stage disease. …

Certain form of baldness at age 45 linked to higher risk for aggressive prostate cancer

“Our study found an increased risk for aggressive prostate cancer only in men with a very specific pattern of hair loss, baldness at the front and moderate hair-thinning on the crown of the head, at the age of 45. But we saw no increased risk for any form of prostate cancer in men with other hair-loss patterns,” said senior study author Michael B. Cook, PhD, an investigator in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD…

Medicine looking deeper into vital differences between women, men

That’s hardly an earth-shattering observation, but the fact is that, aside from the most obvious physical differences between the sexes, medicine has traditionally treated women as if they were merely smaller men. “When we look closely, we tend to find differences” between men and women, said Sarah L. Berga, M.D., professor and chair of obstetrics and gynecology and vice president for women’s health services at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. “But for most of the past, we never looked.” That started to change in the late 1980s, when physicians and researchers recognized that women’s health encompassed more than those conditions unique to females; that women’s experiences with gender-common conditions and the treatments for them often differed significantly from those of men…

What works for women doesn’t work for men

But unlike in women, neither soy protein nor a common antidepressant provides relief for men, according to researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Hot flashes occur in approximately 80 percent of men who are undergoing hormone manipulation as treatment for prostate cancer. Hormone therapy reduces the levels of male hormones, called androgens, to prevent them from reaching prostate cancer cells and stimulating their growth. "Changing hormone levels cause hot flashes in both women and men, so we hoped that using soy supplements and/or an antidepressant would help reduce them in men as it does in many women," said Mara Vitolins, Dr…

Soy protein supplementation does not reduce risk of prostate cancer recurrence after radical prostatectomy, study finds

"Prostate cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy and the second most frequent cause of male cancer death in the United States and other Western countries but is far less frequent in Asian countries. Prostate cancer risk has been inversely associated with intake of soy and soy foods in observational studies, which may explain this geographic variation because soy consumption is low in the United States and high in Asian countries," according to background information in the article. "Although it has been repeatedly proposed that soy may prevent prostate cancer development, this hypothesis has not been tested in randomized studies with cancer as the end point. A substantive fraction (48 percent — 55 percent) of men diagnosed as having prostate cancer use dietary supplements including soy products, although the exact proportion is not known…