Although previous studies suggested that reducing cholesterollevels may increase cancer risk, two studies point to the contrary in cases of prostate cancer.
Two studies published in the latest issue of Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention demolish the belief that lowering total cholesterol levels may favor the development of cancer. Moreover, both works point to the contrary, lower cholesterol levels may reduce the risk of prostate cancer in its extreme forms.
* Although previous studies indicated that lower the levels of cholesterol increased the risk of cancer, this study suggests otherwise.
Demetrius Albanes, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute of America, points in the first of the jobs that one of the conclusions of this research is that “a drop in total cholesterol levels may be caused by an undiagnosed cancer. In relative terms, public health, the authors note that elevated levels of HDL cholesterol seem to prevent all cancers.
Major and minor risk
The study of more than 29,000 men for 18 years makes the initiative led by Albanes one of the most important to date. During the monitoring period, 7545 cancers were diagnosed and found that low levels of total cholesterol were associated with a 18 percent risk of developing cancer increased.
These figures are similar to those which had been obtained in previous investigations, but the authors observed that the risk disappeared when excluding the cases occurred in the early years of the first control blood.
The results suggest that reduced levels of total cholesterol were not the cause of cancer. High levels of HDL cholesterol, in fact, a risk associated with a 14 percent lower for the disease even after excluding cases detected in the first nine years of monitoring.
In another study, which specifically examined the risk of prostate cancer, Elizabeth Platz, program co-director of Cancer Control and Prevention, Johns Hopkins University, U.S., has established a relationship between low levels of cholesterol and a decrease in cancer risk.
Scaled Gleason
Specifically, in this second investigation, conducted in froma parallel to the first, if the men studied had a total cholesterol levels of 200 mg / dl or less, the risk of prostate cancer in its most aggressive was a 59 per cent lower, with figures set of eight to ten on the Gleason scale. Platz noted that no association was observed between overall or prostate cancer with lower amounts in the above scale.