The environment and prostate cancer: is there a signal? – Recording now available
Recording is now available at the following link:
Efforts to elucidate the causes of prostate cancer have met with little success to date and we are still entirely bereft of ways to prevent it. All that is known with certainty is that incidence increases exponentially with age, is higher among men whose father or brother had the disease, and varies by ancestry. Genetics explain a modest portion of familial risk. International comparisons of incidence, temporal trends, social class gradients, and migrant studies strongly suggest that exogenous factors play an important etiological role. Yet the specific factors actually involved, and how they interplay, remain elusive.
We conducted in Montreal, Canada what is probably the largest case-control study to date to investigate the role of environmental factors in prostate cancer risk. The Prostate Cancer & Environment Study (PROtEuS) is set to investigate the role of lifetime occupational exposure to 345 workplace agents, occupational circumstances, spatially-referenced factors, along with lifestyle habits. Anthropometric measurements have been taken and biological specimens have been collected.
The seminar provided an overview of PROtEuS, along with some recent findings in relation to the environment most specifically. An overall trend is emerging suggesting a positive association with traffic-related air pollution, street-level ultrafine particles, and a negative association with residential greenness. These observations appear to be independent of contextual and personal factors, including prostate cancer screening. Area-based material and social deprivation indices were found to be associated with prostate cancer risk whereas walkability around the residence was not. Others results focusing on workplace exposure to metals and to psychological stress were also presented.