Testicular cancer has risen among men at an alarming rate and medical experts might have find the cause for that: muscle supplements.
A new medical research believes that muscle supplements in the form of powders or pills containing androstenedione or creatine might enlarge the chances of developing testicular cancer. The lead author o the research is Ni Li from Yale University and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences along with the participation of several medical experts and health institutions.
The senior author of the study, epidemiology professor,Tongzhang Zheng,stated that the risk of testicular cancer was high among men younger than 25 years old who have been taking muscle supplements, men who have been taken them for long periods of time and men who have been using several types of supplements. Researchers have noticed that the relationship between the two of them was strong.
The earlier you start taking them, the higher the risk of developing testicular cancer becomes.
Statistics have shown a large increase of testicular cancer. In 1975 there were 3.7 cases out of 100,000 men while in 2011 it has increased to 5.9 cases out of 100,000 men. For the moment, researchers cannot fully explain why the incidence of cases almost doubled as they describe testicular cancer as a mysterious disease and none of the factors they had in mind, could explain the high increase.
The study which has been published in the British Journal of Cancer, has discovered that intake of muscle supplements has proved to be linked to a higher risk of testicular cancer.
Professor Zheng has organised a series of interviews of almost 900 men living in Connecticut and Massachusetts, out of which 356 were suffering from testicular germ cancer and the rest of 513 were healthy.
The questions implied asking the participants things about their daily habits and lifestyle, such as if they were taking supplements, if they were drinking or smoking, how often did they exercise, if they had had testicular cancer in their family or if they had suffered any type of injury to that specific area.
Apart from these factors, researchers established the results taking into consideration also other possible factors, like race, age and location.
The results of the questionnaire showed that the men who were taking muscle supplements had a 65% higher risk of developing or having developed testicular cancer, than the men who were not consuming supplements.
Consuming means intake of supplements for at least once per week, four a duration of four weeks in a row or even more.
Men who were using more types of supplements had an increased rate of 177% than those who were using only one type of supplements, of 156% of the men who have been taking muscle supplements for a period of up to three years or longer and of 121% of the men of 25 years or younger who had started taking supplements, reports of the research have estimated.
If this connection was to be confirmed by further studies, and taking into consideration the strong link between testicular cancer and supplements, medical experts might have come across a way of preventing the development of testicular cancer.
Future studies and experiments will be conducted in order to determine why do body building supplements contribute to developing testicular cancer.
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