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כאשר גבר מביא לעולם את ילדו הראשון, הסיכון שלו לכל החיים לסרטן הערמונית עולה ב-16%.

למרות שחוקרים אינם יודעים מהי הסיבה לכך, ממצאי מחקר חדש, המבוססים על נתונים של 51.6 גברים, הם ודאיים כפי שכל עובדה סטטיסטית יכולה להיות.

ועובדה נוספת - לאחר שגבר מביא לעולם את ילדו השני, כל ילד נוסף מוריד את הסיכון שלו לסרטן הערמונית ב-5%.

Why these things might happen is a mystery even to the researchers who discovered the disturbing factoids. But facts they are, says Morten Frisch, MD, PhD, DSc, senior investigator at the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark.

"This is very, very, very statistically significant," Frisch tells WebMD. "It could be the one needle in the haystack; just a statistical anomaly. But we don't believe that. The findings are very comparable to a larger study in Sweden and also to other studies. I do not think you should attribute this to chance."

Why might fathering a child increase prostate cancer risk? Why should three or more children diminish this risk?

"This is very puzzling," Frisch says. "We have no good biological data to give us a hint as to why these two apparently divergent findings come up. Probably there are two different explanations."

Frisch and colleagues published their findings in the Feb. 15 issue of the American Cancer Society's journal Cancer. So WebMD asked ACS chief medical officer Otis Brawley, MD, to explain the findings.

"I still wonder about this finding itself," Brawley says. "Nobody can recommend that men not have kids to prevent having prostate cancer. It may be there is something about guys with good sperm motility having a higher risk of prostate cancer, although I don't believe that to be true."

The true importance of the finding, if any, may not become clear for years. Brawley points to the example of the 1930s finding that nuns rarely got cervical cancer -- and that many of the few nuns who did were reformed "bad girls."

Now, Brawley says, we know that cervical cancer can be caused by human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted infection not yet linked to cancer in the 1930s.

Frisch notes that the study disproves an earlier finding that men who do not have sons are at increased risk of prostate cancer. The Danish data shows that the sex of a man's offspring does not affect his prostate cancer risk.
View Article Sources
SOURCES: Jorgensen, K.T. Cancer, Feb. 15, 2008; published online Jan. 7, 2007. Morten Frisch, MD, PhD, DSc, senior investigator, Statens Serum Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark. Otis Brawley, MD, chief medical officer, American Cancer Society.

© 2008 WebMD, Inc. All rights reserved.

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