Smoking linked to more aggressive prostate cancer

Smokers, if you're sweating lung cancer or heart disease or stroke, put prostate cancer on your list of diseases now stalking you.  The bad news...

• If smoking when diagnosed with prostate cancer, you're 61% more likely to die from it than a nonsmoker
• Smoking might directly affect the aggressiveness of cancer
• Smokers are 61% more likely to experience a recurrence of prostate cancer after treatment
• Men who smoked a pack a day for 40 years (or the equivalent of two packs over 20 years) were 82% more likely to die of prostate cancer than non-smokers
• Even former smokers who kicked the habit are more likely to succomb to PC than nonsmokers.

This from a new study, published in the Journal of American Medical Association, that
followed 5,366 men with prostate cancer over an average of eight years, from 1986 and 2006.  Here's the story from Health.com....

And the good news? Those who quit 10 years before getting a prostate cancer diagnosis were no more likely to die of the disease than men who had never smoked at all. Even men who quit less than a decade before diagnosis had similar survival rates to nonsmokers, provided they were not heavy smokers to begin with.

The authors wrote that the carcinogens in tobacco smoke could encourage tumor promotion, as well as higher testosterone levels. The researchers concluded: 

"In summary, smoking at the time of diagnosis was associated with substantially increased overall mortality and prostate cancer mortality and recurrence. Ten-year quitters had risks similar to never smokers. These results provide further support that smoking may increase risk of death from prostate cancer."

"Smoking and Prostate Cancer Survival and Recurrence"
Stacey A. Kenfield, ScD; Meir J. Stampfer, MD, DrPH; June M. Chan, ScD; Edward Giovannucci, MD, ScD