Although obese men tend to have more aggressive prostate cancer going into surgery, they do just as well as thinner men in the years afterward, a study suggests, . The findings, published in the journal Cancer and reviewed by Reuters Health, suggest that obese men need not fear that their weight will add to their risk of cancer recurrence or death. "I think this is a reassuring study for obese men," lead study author Dr. Sameer A. Siddiqui told Reuters Health. "Even with worse cancers, their outcomes were the same." The role of obesity in prostate cancer -- both its development and its response to therapy -- has not been clear. Some studies, but not all, have found that compared with normal-weight men, obese men may be at greater risk of tumor recurrence after having surgery to remove the prostate gland. To investigate, Siddiqui and his colleagues at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, followed more than 5,300 men who'd undergone radical prostatectomy at their center in the 1990s. Radical prostatectomy removes the whole prostate gland and nearby lymph nodes. The researchers found that while obese men were more likely to have relatively aggressive tumors, their risk of death or cancer recurrence in the decade following surgery was comparable to that of normal-weight men.
