Elevated Insulin Levels and Prostate Cancer

Groundbreaking research now not only provides compelling evidence that prostate cancer mortality and obesity are linked, but also shows that the relationship is far more robust than previously thought and is quite unexpectedly worsened by elevated insulin levels.
A survey conducted by investigators at McGill University and Harvard Medical School assessed data from 2,546 American men diagnosed with prostate cancer. During the 24 years of follow-up, 281 died from their disease.
Compared with the 1,470 men of healthy weight at baseline, it was found that the 989 subjects who were overweight had a statistically significant 1.5-fold higher risk of prostate cancer-specific death and in the 87 who were obese, this risk was 2.7 times higher.
One of the innovative study findings was that blood specimens taken from patients showed that insulin levels were also predictors of prostate cancer-specific death. If men were both obese and had high insulin levels, they had a statistically significant four-fold higher risk of mortality.
To demonstrate the magnitude of this effect, Dr. Pollack, co-lead investigator of the study and director of the cancer prevention program at McGill, states, "If you were a prostate cancer patient, it would be more important for your survival to have a normal insulin level and a normal weight than it would be to have access to the best chemotherapy.”
Understanding that insulin is in fact a player in prostate cancer significantly deviates from all of the text-books that stipulate that androgens are the only relevant hormone when it comes to adverse prognostic factors. Prostate cancer cells have insulin receptors and this may give an approach to understanding both the mechanism of the higher rate of cancer, not to mention possible new approaches to therapy.
This was a summary posted in the Medical Post and written by David Hodges. In my opinion, it only confirms the link between obesity, higher insulin levels and heightened risk for cancers of all sorts – in addition to the risk of diabetes, vascular damage, arthritis, hypertension and high cholesterol.