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Prostate Cancer - Risk Factors
What Are The Risk Factors for Prostate Cancer?
Anything that increases your chance of contracting a disease like cancer is considered a risk factor.
Risk factors for various skin cancer vary. For instance, prolonged exposure to direct sunlight increases
the risk of developing skin cancer. A risk factor for many cancers is smoking.
But risk factors don't tell us everything. Many people with one or more risk factors never get
cancer, while others with this disease may have had no known risk factors.
Researchers have discovered several factors that may alter the risk of developing prostate cancer,
despite the fact that we still don't fully understand the causes of the disease. The relationship
between some of these factors and the risk of prostate cancer
is still unclear.
Age
is the strongest risk factor for prostate cancer.
prostate cancer Prostate cancer is extremely uncommon
before the age of 40, but the risk increases significantly after the age of 50.
Almost 2 out of 3 prostate cancer are found in men over the
age of 65.
Race/ethnicity
prostate cancer occurs more often in African-American men than
in men of other races. African-American men are also more likely to be diagnosed at an advanced stage, and
are more than twice as likely to die of prostate cancer as
white men. prostate cancer occurs less often in Asian-American
and Hispanic/Latino men than in non-Hispanic whites. The reasons for these racial and ethnic differences are
not clear.
Nationality
The regions with the highest prevalence of prostate cancer are North America, western Europe,
Australia, and Caribbean islands. Asia, Africa, Central America, and South America are less likely
to encounter it. There is no clear explanation for this. This difference most likely results from more
thorough screening in some developed nations, but other elements are probably also significant. For
instance, lifestyle differences (diet, etc.) may be crucial: men of Asian descent living in the
United States have a higher risk of prostate cancer than men of similar backgrounds living in Asia,
despite having a lower risk than white Americans.
Family history
It appears thatprostate cancer runs in some families, indicating that there may occasionally be an
inherited or genetic factor. A man's risk of developing prostate cancer more than doubles if his
father or brother has the condition. (Men with an affected brother are at higher risk than men with
an affected father.) Men who have multiple affected relatives are at significantly higher risk,
particularly if those relatives were young when the cancer was discovered.
Genes
Researchers have identified several inherited genes that appear to increase the risk of developing
prostate cancer, but these cases likely represent a very small portion of all cases. The majority
of these genes do not yet have genetic testing available. Recently, the risk of prostate cancer has
been linked to a few common gene variations. If testing for the gene variants will be helpful in
predicting prostate cancer risk, further research is required to confirm these findings.
Some inherited genes increase the risk for multiple cancer types. For instance,
breast and ovarian cancers
are much more prevalent in some families due to inherited mutations of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. Although
they only make up a very small portion of prostate cancer cases, mutations in these genes may also make
some men more susceptible to developingprostate cancer.