Men who sleep with lots of women lessen risk of prostate cancer A surefire way of holding off that scourge of male health, prostate cancer, is to sleep with lots of women - according to the latest research. However, perhaps unfortunately for those gentlemen inclined that way, sleeping with a lot of other men has quite the opposite effect. These bombshells originate in a study from Canadian …
I was an avid reader of Len Deighton's works when they first came out, and on later seeing many of them transferred to the screen was surprised to note that the central character had acquired a name. My hazy memory informs me that the only times he was ever addressed by a name in the canon was as "English" by Colonel Stok.; am I wrong?
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Older research suggests that, yes, having a regular wank does reduce your chances of getting prostate cancer. Hooray!
Good morning:
> Does it follow that a wank a day keeps the cancer at bay?
I'd say that (at least) potentially, it would.
At least according to what the article implies:
"The prostate is heavily involved in sex, producing some of the stuff that makes up the seminal fluid. It would seem that putting it to frequent use can have beneficial consequences."
So ...
The question at hand would be if "putting it to frequent use" necessarily mean that it must be through sexual intercourse, be it with a woman, a man, an anthropomorphic latex substitute or whatever else you may fancy?
Or would a vivid imagination be enough?
I think (I'm no MD) that "some of the stuff" refers to something (I think) is called "Prostate-Specific Antigen" which apparently is part of the seminal fluid that allows sperm cells to live in a foreign environment and if present in the male organism in excess of a certain level, can cause prostate cancer. (corrections invited)
There are blood tests for this which your MD will have you take when over 40.
I have them twice a year.
The tests, of course.
So, it would seem that as long as you ejaculate, you'll get rid of some of the antigen.
Makes sense that the more you ejaculate, the more you get rid of it and the chances of prostate cancer probably will diminish.
But this is not new, I've read about this quite a few years ago.
The survey I recall reading about was done in the US among a large population of men, save the question referred to 'if and from what age' they indulged in the eons old practise of self-gratification.
The conclusion was that the more the better for your prostate.
Cheers.
It would seem that putting it to frequent use can have beneficial consequences.
I have heard that is because you are getting rid of all the shitty nasty fat-seeking molecules that we now have everywhere in our tuna. We need the converse examination for women. Also include male and female lactation, please.
Oh, I can I have a larger version of the "hook-me" picture for this story?
Why are they calling themselves researchers? It would appear on the surface that they asked a statistically quite small group of people some questions and then inferred some "results". They then made up some gibberish to justify a potential cause/effect. This is not science. They could just as easily have been asking who liked chips and come up with a similar bias for cancer (yes, this happens a lot too). Until every single person on the planet has everything they do recorded and every health issue recorded this kind of statistical "study" is just a waste of money. It will take the IBMs, Googles or Apples of the world to use big data techniques on all available data to come up with anything even remotely useful out of statistics.
Until that day, your best bet to avoid cancer is to eat healthily and do plenty of exercise while being vigilant about your own health. If you can, then sure have as much sex as you like but can we stop paying these "researchers" to tell us sex is a good thing?
A few thousand folk is not, in my humble opinion, statistically small. That is the whole point of sampling a population, you can't practically evaluate all so you get "enough" to have some specified confidence interval.
Do you have enough knowledge of statistical method to comment in any more detail?
Bodyless John Brown» The real problem is that they asked men to be honest about how much sex they get.
The Onion, my news source of choice, covered this recently:
Teen Boys Losing Virginity Earlier And Earlier, Report Teen Boys
http://www.theonion.com/video/teen-boys-losing-virginity-earlier-and-earlier-rep,35906/
It might well be a statistically small sample for the conclusions drawn. Of the 3,208 studied, those who'd had sex with more than 20 women had a lower risk of prostate cancer, while those who'd had sex with more than 20 men had a higher risk. But what isn't clear from this article, or the abstract of the paper in Cancer Epidemiology, is how many of the 3,208 fell into those groups.
If it turns out, for example, that only 20 men fell into the group of having sex with >20 men then that would be a very small sample upon which to draw any conclusions.
"a statistically quite small group of people"
It looks quite large to me. An increased sample, using the same sampling methodology, would probably just continue to show any built-in biases that might exist. Unfortunately, the study isn't free to access, so we can't say much about the methodology. I'll assume it was done sensibly. (But I smiled when imagining that the group with diagnosed cancer had an average age of 70 while the control group had an average age of 25 and were to be asked about their sex lives. I'm reminded of Kevin Bridges, "Who me? Put me down for 30.")
For speculation on the difference between straight and gay results, could it be that the vision of a face faking orgasm has previously unknown effects. That would kill the wanking theory. Darn!
There was one published in the Sun (must be the truth) many years back that proved that the more phones you had in a house (said it was old) the more you are likley to die of a heart attack.
The graphs fitted together so beautifully, it had to be true, didn't it.
(this was used as part of an Open University course to show that you really need to prove your data rather than just spunk it out )
Per capita consumption of cheese (US) correlates with Number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets
A causal connection is not impossible. It's fairly well-known that eating cheese in the evening can result in disturbed sleep or nightmares.
Some further study with respect to types of cheese and time of ingestion thereof is called for. (Also plenty of wine to wash the cheese down with).
Given that the largest risk factor for prostate cancer is age, and high testosterone levels increase that risk.
But since sex with another person, and masturbation (wanking for those illiterates reading (sic)), do not seem to affect hormone levels much, maybe they should go back to the drawing board?
At least there has been no attempt to link prostate cancer to climate change in the research: Yet.
But the ¨having loads of sex with a member/s of the opposite sex¨ thing seems to indictate a long-term grant application....
"a statistically quite small group of people"
"It looks quite large to me." Not for this sort of research UNLESS they set up the project with a specific null-hypothesis relating numbers of sexual partners and prostate cancer. If they just looked for something associated with prostate cancer, it means nothing (and the fact that opposite results were found in heterosexual & homosexual men supports this). I did a study once trying to see if particular immunohistochemical patterns were associated with good or poor prognosis in leukaemia and lymphoma. I was too lazy to retype the list of parameters I wanted analysed and just put in "*" so the software analysed everything it had.
There was an amazingly strong correlation between being called "John" or "Mary" and early death.
"Until every single person on the planet has everything they do recorded and every health issue recorded this kind of statistical "study" is just a waste of money" --- Lusty
If that were true, and every datum needed to be collected, opinion polling, a significant amount of quality control and a huge amount of science would be invalid --- we'd still be unsure as to whether or not cigarettes were harmful.
IS2R that a randomly chosen sample of 1000 from a population of millions would give you a worst case 95% confidence interval of about 3 percentage points on an either/or survey question. This is obviously a more complex case, but if sampling is good enough, it is certainly possible to draw conclusions about the population with a high degree of confidence.
It would appear on the surface that they asked a statistically quite small group of people some questions and then inferred some "results".
It could indeed appear so to someone with little knowledge of statistics or of the concept of prior plausibility.
"It could indeed appear so to someone with little knowledge of statistics or of the concept of prior plausibility."
That's kind of my point though, I do know enough about statistics to know that this is no more meaningful than saying that male drivers "statistically" have more accidents. There are so many variables being completely ignored that the results are meaningless and potentially misleading until they actually demonstrate cause and effect. In the case of the male drivers, they also happen to statistically drive far more miles, statistically when they are more tired such as a long commute than women who are statistically less likely to be working, and if they are then statistically less likely to be dragging their ass all over the country.
Possibly the best example is drink driving - this study is akin to saying that 30% of accidents involved drunk drivers therefore driving sober is more risky. You can't just use statistics in isolation, and if you knew as much as you imply that you do then you wouldn't have responded to my comment the way you did.
It is a robust case-control study, as outlined in the abstract. They took cases (histologically proven), and matched them to controls from the electoral list. AFAIK they were only matched on age. Obviously the electoral list biases results but I'm unsure how accurate the list is in Montreal.
They then interviewed all their cases and controls for their habits - difficult to do well. From this information, they calculated an odds ratio between sexual factors (number of partners by sex, previous STIs) adjusted for age, "ancestry, family history of PCa" (I don't understand how these are defined differently - requires reading the whole paper) and PCa screening history.
Their results supported (some) previous studies. My understanding (not my area) is that prostate cancer risk is inversely related to total lifetime ejaculations, with the potential for STIs (associated with more partners) to increase prostate ca risk.
So, a study that adds weight to previous hypotheses without being conclusive (case control studies can only ever demonstrate correlation). It does not appear perfect from the abstract (see various issues above) but it is useful information. To achieve certainty, you would probably have to conduct a longterm intervention study, in which you randomised men to 1) no sexual partner, 2) 1 sexual partner (female or male), 3) multiple sexual partners, then you would follow them for a few decades to see if the rates differed in the different groups. This would seem unlikely to manage ethical acceptance... let alone recruit sufficient subjects, given the potential of being randomised to the control arm (group 1 above).
In conclusion: monogamy and wanking are good to lower your prostate ca risk. But being honest, if you're worrying about prostate ca enough to put you off sex with a prospective new partner, you have more problems than prostate ca. Icon to help relieve those worries.
Your comment is mostly fine except the "statistically quite small group" bit. A 1000 is a pretty decent sample, as long as its representative of a larger population (eg: no "internet surveys"). The (arguable) problems with this study are:
- Self reported unverifiable data.
- Causation/co-relation yada yada. Maybe people who are "about to get" cancer don't feel like sleeping around.
- Jumping to a populist conclusion they wanted to arrive at.
One could easily conclude that people who boast about their conquests have a lesser likelihood of cancer. Or, male researchers likely to find reasons that justify their fantasies. Or, prostrate cancer makes you too tired to go out at night. Or, people living in cities less likely to get prostrate cancer. Or, people who have prostrate cancer think less about sex. Add your own conclusion here.
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