Risk + Prevention
Contents of This Section
Summary Overview
Men have no safe, proven way that can be used to prevent prostate cancer, and many things (including age, genetics, race, and environment) may affect their risk for this disease.
As yet there is no good evidence that taking supplements can prevent prostate cancer. Lycopene and tomatoes haven’t been proven to work either. Selenium and other micro-nutrients seem to come with risks as well as benefits. And the only major, completed, randomized, double-blind clinical trial carried out to investigate the potential of a drug to prevent prostate cancer — the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT) — gave us results that were as potentially worrisome as they were potentially helpful.
What we do have today is some preliminary evidence that baseline PSA levels taken in early middle age may offer an indicator of long-term risk for the development of prostate cancer. In addition, the PCPT prostate cancer risk calculator and the Sunnybrook risk calulator both offer ways for a man and his primary care physician to assess his risk for prostate cancer and therefore the need for a prostate biopsy based on things like his PSA and DRE results.
This section of The “New” Prostate Cancer InfoLink will seek to keep you up to date with any useful information about ways to prevent prostate cancer or at least lower men’s risk for this disease. For starters, have a look at Prevention: an introduction. We have posted a summary of the key findings of the PCPT trial and information about SELECT and other trials that are currently seeking to define the potential for prostate cancer prevention.
