Infertile men have an increased risk of developing high grade prostate cancer, which is more likely to grow and spread quickly. That is the conclusion of a new study published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The study's results suggest that because infertility may be an identifiable risk factor for prostate cancer, early screening may be warranted in infertile men.
Research focusing on the number of children a man has have pointed to male fertility's potential associated with risk for prostate cancer. However, studies on the topic have generated conflicting results: some have found that men with children had a higher risk than childless men; some have found that men with fewer children had a higher risk than men with more children; still others failed to identify any association between the number of children fathered and a man's risk for prostate cancer.
Because the number of children a man has may not accurately reflect his ability to cause a pregnancy, Thomas Walsh, MD, MS, of the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues designed a more accurate study to evaluate the association between male infertility and prostate cancer. They studied the risk for prostate cancer in a group of 22,562 men evaluated for infertility from 1967 to 1998 in 15 California infertility centers. The incidence of prostate cancer in these men was compared with the incidence in a sample of men in the general population who were of similar ages and from similar geographic locations.