Entries for June 2008

Prostate Danger for Men With BRCA2 Gene

There's grim news this week for men carrying a faulty version of the BRCA2 gene. Medical News Today reports on a new study that found that men with prostate cancer caused by that gene are more than twice as likely to die from the disease as those carrying a faulty BRCA1 gene. Both those gene mutations significantly increase the risk that a man's female relatives—and that he himself—will develop breast cancer. (The National Cancer Institute has more detailed info about these genes.) Fortunately, only a small percent of men with prostate cancer have either BRCA gene. Still, it's worth knowing if you're one of the unlucky ones.

The next time you're at a ballgame, don't be surprised if you get a quick lecture from Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, a melanoma survivor, about protecting your skin from the sun. For the tenth consecutive year, MLB has teamed up with the American Academy of Dermatology in the Play Sun Smart campaign, which warns players and fans about the risks of sun exposure. The effort will feature public service announcements at games, distribution of sun safety cards at ballparks, and free screening exams.

Yawn, yawn. I know. It's certainly no shocker that a professional sports league has agreed to leverage its star power to publicize a public health problem. What is surprising, however, are some of the facts that dermatological groups brandish about men and skin cancer. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, a nonprofit group that receives funding from companies that market sunscreen, men have nearly double the rates of squamous and basal cell carcinomas that women have. And for melanoma—the deadliest type of skin cancer—men have the highest chances of dying of the disease, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. Of the estimated 8,420 people who will die of melanoma in 2008, about 64 percent of them will be men, the group says.

Mind Over Human Growth Hormone

I've written before about concerns in the medical community that older men who take human growth hormone (HGH) to ward off the effects of age may not be getting what they bargained for. Might younger men who take HGH to bulk up—including all the baseball players who have caused such controversy—also be fooling themselves that they're experiencing an effect? As HealthDay reports, a study of recreational athletes has found that those who thought they were taking the performance-enhancing drug tended to perform better—even if they were actually taking a placebo. "There is actually no firm scientific proof that growth hormone actually does enhance athletic performance, despite a widespread belief in its ability to do so," one of the authors told HealthDay. Indeed, a literature review, published in May in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found no evidence that HGH could boost athletic prowess. And here's another intriguing tidbit of information about the placebo effect: Costly placebos seem to work better than cheap ones, according to a study published last March by a Duke University researcher.

Popular culture may paint men as the stronger sex, but from the moment a boy is born, his life is more likely than his sister's to be cut short. Across national and cultural boundaries, men die an average of seven years earlier than women; the disparity in the United States is approximately five years. In a new book, Why Men Die First, Marianne Legato, a specialist in gender-specific medicine at Columbia University, explains: They're genetically and biologically fragile to start with, she says, and societal norms that encourage and even demand risky behavior by men put them at risk. Still, Legato told U.S. News, men and their families can push back. She highlighted seven reasons why males die prematurely—and seven actions they can take to prolong their time.

1. Males are burdened with natural genetic deficits.

While every cell in a woman's body has two large X chromosomes, men have one X and one smaller Y chromosome; the Y is half the size. The "spare" X chromosomes allow women's bodies to compensate when faced with damage in ways that men's cells cannot. In addition, mutations are three to six times more likely in a Y chromosome than an X chromosome. This genetic deficit could be part of the reason why miscarriages, infections, birth defects, cancers, and many other health problems strike males especially hard.

I've written before about some of the reasons why men have shorter lifespans than women, so I enjoyed listening to a panel on this topic hosted by the University of North Carolina this week. Study after study has shown that numerous illnesses, ranging from cancer to heart disease to autism, strike men in greater numbers, more swiftly, and with greater force than they do women. Indeed, the lifespan gap between the genders, though narrowing, is still about 5.2 years.

The panel looked beyond the differences between men and women to the particular situation of nonwhite men. While the average life expectancy for men as a group is about 75.2, the average is just 69.8 for black men. That's more than a decade less than the average for white women. The stats for nonwhite Hispanics, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders are more encouraging: Life expectancy for those groups appears to be higher than whites, although the National Center for Health Statistics does not published official life expectancy estimates for these groups because of the limitations of the existing data.