Journal article
Tall height and obesity are associated with an increased risk of aggressive prostate cancer: results from the EPIC cohort study
- Abstract:
-
Background
The relationships between body size and prostate cancer risk, and in particular risk by tumour characteristics, are not clear because most studies have not differentiated between tumours that are high grade and those that are advanced stage, but rather have assessed risk with a combined category of aggressive disease. We investigated the association of height and adiposity with incidence of and death from prostate cancer in 141,896 men in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC).
Methods
Multivariable-adjusted Cox proportional hazards models were used to calculate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). After an average of 13.9 years of follow-up there were 7,024 incident prostate cancers and 934 prostate cancer deaths.
Results
Height was not associated with total prostate cancer risk. Subgroup analyses showed heterogeneity in the association with height by tumour grade (Pheterogeneity=0.002), with a positive association with risk for high grade, but not low-intermediate grade, disease (HR for high grade disease tallest versus shortest fifth of height 1.54, 95% CI 1.18-2.03). Greater height was also associated with a higher risk for prostate cancer death (HR=1.43, 1.14-1.80). BMI was significantly inversely associated with total prostate cancer, but there was evidence of heterogeneity by tumour grade (Pheterogeneity=0.01; HR=0.89, 0.79-0.99 for low-intermediate grade and HR=1.32, 1.01-1.72 for high grade prostate cancer) and stage (Pheterogeneity=0.01; HR=0.86, 0.75-0.99 for localized stage and HR=1.11, 0.92-1.33 for advanced stage). BMI was positively associated with prostate cancer death (HR=1.35, 1.09-1.68). The results for waist circumference were generally similar to those for BMI, but the associations were slightly stronger for high grade (HR=1.43, 1.07-1.92) and fatal prostate cancer (HR=1.55, 1.23-1.96).
Conclusions
The findings from this large prospective study show that men who are taller and who have greater adiposity have an elevated risk of high grade prostate cancer and prostate cancer death.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 415.5KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12916-017-0876-7
Authors
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- BMC Medicine More from this journal
- Volume:
- 15
- Pages:
- 115
- Publication date:
- 2017-07-01
- Acceptance date:
- 2017-05-16
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1741-7015
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
pubs:695483
- UUID:
-
uuid:05972935-882e-45bf-b5fb-f8ff0a799a53
- Local pid:
-
pubs:695483
- Deposit date:
-
2017-05-16
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Perez-Cornago et al
- Copyright date:
- 2017
- Notes:
- © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record