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High triglycerides linked with prostate cancer recurrence

A new study has linked high triglyceride levels in the blood with recurrence of prostate cancer.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study has linked high triglyceride levels in the blood with recurrence of prostate cancer.

Among men who had surgery for prostate cancer, those with elevated triglyceride levels before surgery were 35 percent more likely to show signs of a cancer recurrence than men with normal preoperative levels.

Eating more calories than you can burn can hike levels of triglycerides, which are a type of fat in the blood.

The study reinforces the benefits of maintaining a healthy lifestyle, epidemiologist Elizabeth Platz told Reuters Health.

"We do know how to lower risk of disease, including prostate cancer, with lifestyle changes," she said. "The triglycerides are increased in part due to poor diet."

Platz, who studies cancer prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, was not involved with the current study.

"We all need to think about modifying behaviors that promote well being in general - not smoking, reducing obesity, increasing physical activity while decreasing sedentary time," she said.

Investigators studied the records of men who were not taking cholesterol-lowering statin pills before their prostates were removed at six Veterans Affairs hospitals inCalifornia, Georgia and North Carolina.

After prostate cancer treatment, 293 of the 843 men in the study had a so-called biochemical recurrence, defined as a rising level of PSA, or prostate-specific antigen, in their blood.

The researchers expected to find more prostate cancer recurrences in men with high pre-surgical cholesterol levels. But they did not.

Instead, they found that for the overall group, only high triglycerides raised recurrence risk, according to the study published in Cancer, Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

When the researchers looked only at the 325 men with abnormally high preoperative cholesterol levels, however, they found the risk of recurrence increased 9 percent for each 10 milligrams per deciliter in total cholesterol above the abnormal cutoff of 200 mg/dL.

More striking, though, was their finding that among men with abnormally low levels of "good" HDL cholesterol (that is, below the desired level of 40 mg/dL), every extra 10 mg/dL of HDL brought the risk of recurrence down by 39 percent.

"Our findings suggest that controlling lipid levels is not only important for cardiovascular disease but also may have a role in prostate cancer," lead author Emma Allottfrom Duke University Medical School in Durham, North Carolina told Reuters Health.

The study can't prove that cholesterol and triglycerides caused the recurrence of prostate cancer.

Still, Allott said, "Controlling your lipid levels is well known to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. Here we're showing that there may be a role for prostate cancer."

Aside from non-melanoma skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in American men, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2011, nearly 210,000 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and 27,970 died from it.

The researchers call for additional studies of the role of cholesterol in prostate cancer growth. They also note that other studies have linked cholesterol-lowering statins with a reduced risk of prostate cancer recurrence.

But both Platz and Allott say the study should not be interpreted as a call for taking cholesterol-lowering drugs.

"We would not ever say that men should take a statin drug to prevent prostate cancer," Platz said. "Statin drugs do have widely known adverse health effects."

"Improving your diet and taking more exercise," Allott said, "there's no potential harm with that bit of advice."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1ngr3Wt Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention