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Heart Risk Elevated After Prostate Cancer Diagnosis
Reported December 21, 2009
(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Men newly diagnosed with prostate cancer have
an increased risk of cardiovascular events and suicide.
Katja Fall and colleagues from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden
found that the relative risks of cardiovascular events and suicide were
elevated during the first year after prostate cancer diagnosis, particularly
during the first week.
The researchers used the Swedish Cancer Register to identify men 30 years or
older diagnosed with prostate cancer between 1961 and 2004, and then
searched for information on men's subsequent fatal and non-fatal
cardiovascular events and suicides from the Causes of Death Register and the
Inpatient Register in Sweden. Of the 168,584 men diagnosed with prostate
cancer during the study period, 6 percent experienced a cardiovascular event
during the year following diagnosis and .08 percent committed suicide.
The researchers found that before 1987, men with prostate cancer were about
11 times as likely as healthy men to have a fatal cardiovascular event
during the first week after their diagnosis. During the first year after
their diagnosis, men with prostate cancer were nearly twice as likely to
have a cardiovascular event.
Because a very few men newly diagnosed with prostate cancer committed
suicide (just 136 of nearly 170,000 men included in the study), the absolute
risk of suicide is very small. However, the relative risk of suicide
associated with a diagnosis of prostate cancer was 8.4 during the first week
and 2.6 during the first year after diagnosis throughout the study period.
The authors say that the emotional stress associated with the diagnosis of
prostate cancer may lead to higher risks of cardiovascular morbidity and
suicide. "The risks are highest during the first week after diagnosis and
young men seem to be most vulnerable,” the authors were quoted as saying.
"These unrecognized consequences of a prostate cancer diagnosis deserve the
attention of health professionals to the increasing number of men that are
diagnosed with this disease."
SOURCE: PLoS Medicine, December 15, 2009 |
