- Weight gain in a man’s young adult years is strongly associated with an increased risk of aggressive or fatal prostate cancer, according to a new Swedish study.
- For young men with obesity, there are several known changes in the body that may explain the link to worse prostate cancer outcomes later on.
- The study highlights the importance of maintaining a healthy weight across adulthood for men to help prevent the development of prostate cancer, as well as other serious diseases.
A study from Sweden finds that men who gain weight as young adults are more likely to develop aggressive or fatal prostate cancer later on.
According to the study, men who gained on average 1 kilogram each year from the ages of 17 to 29 increased their risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer by 13% and fatal prostate cancer by 27%.
The study was conducted by researchers from Lund University in Malmö, Sweden, and the authors presented their findings at the European Congress on Obesity (ECO) 2023 in Dublin, Ireland.
While weight gain was associated with prostate cancer across adulthood, its incidence was driven more directly by weight gain in young adults.
For men gaining about 1.1 pounds (0.5 kilograms) over the course of their adult lives, the risk of aggressive cancer was increased by 10%, and the risk of fatal cancer rose by 29%.
Researchers tracked health data for 258,477 men who had taken part in the Obesity and Disease Development Sweden (ODDS) study between 1963–2014. Each had been prostate-cancer-free at the start of the ODDS study, and was weighed at least three times between the ages of 17 and 60 years.
For the new study, participants were followed up for an average of 43 years, until 2019, at which time cases of prostate cancer and deaths among the group were recorded.
Of the entire study cohort, 23,348 participants had been diagnosed with prostate cancer at an average age of 70 years, and 4,790 had died from prostate cancer.
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