Newsflash 15 September
On September 12 and 13 the 2nd NEEM was organised in Vilnius, Lithuania. Chairman of the meeting was Professor Diamantas Milonas from Kaunas (LT), who considered it a successful meeting. Prof. Milonas: “Objective of this EAU regional meeting was to develop a platform, where new experimental and clinical work from the region is presented to an international audience.”
A regional meeting like the NEEM is very important for several reasons. First - it provides an open auditorium for residents and young urologists. Second - old and new friends from neighbouring countries can meet to share experiences and develop networks within the region. And finally - it is a top level scientific conference.
The meeting programme consisted of state-of-the-art lectures about prostate cancer, bladder cancer and andrology, poster sessions and panel discussions.
The EAU regional meetings are accredited within the EU-ACME programme by the European Board of
Urology in compliance with the EBU/UEMS regulations. The meeting was also CME accredited by different National Urological Societies.
Antidiabetic Medication and Prostate Cancer Risk: A Population-based Case-Control Study
Teemu J. Murtola, Teuvo L. J. Tammela, Jorma Lahtela, and Anssi Auvinen
Received for publication January 30, 2008; accepted for publication May 30, 2008
Decreased risk of prostate cancer in diabetic men has been reported. This article evaluated the association between antidiabetic medication use and prostate cancer at the population level. All incident prostate cancer cases in Finland during 1995–2002 were identified from the Finnish Cancer Registry. Matched controls were provided by the Population Register Center (24,723 case-control pairs). Information on medication use was obtained from a comprehensive prescription database. Multivariable-adjusted odds ratios were computed by using conditional logistic regression. The article mentions that prostate cancer risk was decreased for antidiabetic medication users (odds ratio ¼ 0.87, 95% confidence interval: 0.82, 0.92). The decrease was observed for most drug groups. The odds ratio decreased in a dose-dependent fashion by quantity of use. Duration of antidiabetic treatment was inversely associated with overall prostate cancer risk and risk of advanced cancer. Similar risk reduction for users of different antidiabetic drugs suggests that diabetes, instead of the medication itself, is behind the association. This finding is
unlikely to be secondary because of differential uptake of the prostate-specific antigen test or different prostate-specific antigen levels between medication users and nonusers; prevalence of testing in Finland is low. Dose and time dependency of the relation probably indicates that duration of diabetes is negatively associated with risk.
This is the first study known to demonstrate that the association could not be explained by the medications commonly prescribed along with antidiabetic medication.
Source: American Journal of Epidemiology
Association of height with prostate cancer risk: A large nested case-control study and meta-analysis
Zuccolo, L., Harris, R., Gunnell, D., Oliver, S., Lane, J. A., Davis, M., Donovan, J., Neal, D., Hamdy, F., Beynon, R., Savovic, J., & Martin, R. M.
Height is reported positively associated with prostate cancer risk, possibly through the insulin-like growth factor system. Zuccolo et al. (2008) investigated the relationship of prostate cancer with height and its components (leg and trunk length) in a nested case-control study and with height in a dose-response meta-analysis.
The authors nested a case-control study within a population-based randomized controlled trial evaluating treatments for localized prostate cancer in British men ages 50 to 69 years, including 1,357 cases detected through prostate-specific antigen testing and 7,990 controls (matched on age, general practice, assessment date). Nine bibliographic databases were searched systematically for studies on the height-prostate cancer association that were pooled in a meta-analysis.
Based on the nested case-control, the odds ratio (OR) of prostate-specific antigen-detected prostate cancer per 10 cm increase in height was 1.06 [95% confidence interval (95% CI): 0.97-1.16; p = 0.2]. There was stronger evidence of an association of height with high-grade prostate cancer (OR: 1.23; 95% CI: 1.06-1.43), mainly due to the leg component, but not with low-grade disease (OR: 0.99; 95% CI: 0.90-1.10). In general, associations with leg or trunk length were similar. A meta-analysis of 58 studies found evidence that height is positively associated with prostate cancer (random-effects OR per 10 cm: 1.06; 95% CI: 1.03-1.09), with a stronger effect for prospective studies of more advanced/aggressive cancers (random-effects OR: 1.12; 95% CI: 1.05-1.19).
In conclusion, height is positively associated with prostate cancer risk, but the magnitude of the effect is modest and the literature is influenced by publication bias. Overall, these data indicate only a small role for childhood environmental exposures - as indexed by adult height - on prostate cancer incidence. However, the positive association with high-grade cancers in the study was consistent with the evidence on advanced or aggressive cancers from the meta-analysis, suggesting that early life environmental factors may play some role in the development and/or progression of neoplasia with a worse prognosis. Mechanisms that could underlie a height effect on the more aggressive forms of the disease now need to be elucidated.
Source: Urosource
