Pca in first responders World Trade center

clickable link: https://www.cancernetwork.com/news/study-explains-uptick-prostate-cancer-world-trade-center-first-responders

Yup, environmental exposures and chemicals have been thought to increase PC risk. I've often wondered if something like this is the trigger for my PC. Until my generation, no male in our family died from or was diagnosed with PC. My father was an accountant and I worked in the early electronics business - lots of chemical exposure for me (lots of that stuff is now banded).

so it wouldn't surprise me to find this suspected link. I don't think there's "proof" of this, but lots of things point this way.

Andrew

It is well known that organic chemists tended to get bladder cancer due to exposure to things like toluene and benzene (back in the day when O-chem was known as "bucket chemistry"). Environmental exposure is a real thing: you can google many stories about hot spots where there are concentrations of odd cancers in small areas.

I'm in a family that has generations of "prostate problems" in the men. One wonders how many would have been diagnosed with PC if such things were possible....

mattam: very true. My dad was one, and he died of spinal mets from PC at 78.

Roughly 75% of all prostate cancer cases are "sporadic," which is lower than the overall ACS numbers of 90-92% of all cancers being sporadic. A sporadic cancer means that the damage to the genes occurs AFTER a person is born. Sproadic cancers are caused by a the environment, lifestyle and normal aging. Aging affects everyone--and we already know that the #1 risk factor for PC is aging--but environmental and lifestyle exposures/choices that individuals make can add to the known, normal risks.

Just to complete the picture, the remaining 25% are categorized into the 2 remaining categories: hereditary (about 5%) or familial (about 20%). Hereditary cancer is from an inherited defective gene, and familial cancer occurs because of a combination of shared genes and the environment/lifestyle/aging factors.

Prostate cancer is such a ubiquitous, common disease driven largely by aging (an independent factor) that many men in the same family will have it, and the frequency of diagnostics are increased--if your dad had PC, you are more apt to get more PSA tests (observation bias). Your father or brother having PC is not, however, sign of a hereditary disease where there was an actual "inheritance" of a gene defect...it is largely owning the ubiquity of the disease. It was Dr Patrick Walsh, father of modern nerve-sparing RP surgery, who said: "Prostate cancer is so common that even in the rare cases where there is a hereditary factor, there will be other members of the family who will also get the disease sporadically." Interestingly, the OP's link includes this clarifying observation:

Previous studies found an uptick of prostate cancer among World Trade Center first responders compared with the general population of New York state, but it has been unclear whether this epidemiological finding was actually due to an exposure or the result of surveillance bias.

There was some incremental causation found in this study by exposing rats the a similar "dust," but my point in raising this is that "surveillance bias" is a known factor which leads to higher rates of PC diagnosis.

Bringing the discussion back home to this set of HWPC posters, the environmental exposures you guys have talked about (I had my share of them, too) all probably contributed to our sporadic prostate cancer cases.

Post Edited (Blackjack) : 7/18/2019 11:29:04 AM (GMT-6)