Eating lots of fish may not protect men from developing prostate cancer, but it could reduce their risk of dying from the disease, a new review of the medical literature suggests.
"In the United States, one in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer over their lifetime," Dr Konrad M. Szymanski of McGill University Health Center in Montreal, one of the study's authors, told Reuters Health. "One in six of these men will die of prostate cancer. Our study findings suggest that the number of men who die once diagnosed is lowered by more than 50 percent among men eating lots of fish."
While fish is known to have many health benefits, including cutting the risk of heart disease and stroke, the question of whether it could protect against prostate cancer has been "a bit controversial," Szymanski said. To investigate further, he and his colleagues analysed 31 studies including hundreds of thousands of patients, reporting their findings in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Seventeen of the studies were case-control, meaning they compared eating patterns among people with prostate cancer cases and matched controls without the disease. The remaining 14 studies were cohort studies, which followed men over time and compared diets of those who developed prostate cancer to the diets of the men who remained free from the disease.
Overall, Szymanski and his team found no link between eating lots of fish and men's risk of developing prostate cancer. But they did find that men who ate more fish were 44 percent less likely to develop metastatic prostate cancer, meaning disease that had spread beyond the prostate gland. Higher fish consumption also was associated with a 63 percent lower risk of dying from prostate cancer.