Men's Prostate Cancer Risk Will Treble In One Generation, Study Finds

Men's prostate cancer risk is set to treble in one generation, a new study has found, the Daily Mail Reported. According to the study conducted by charity, Cancer Research UK, 14 percent of men born in 2015 will be diagnosed with the disease at some point in their life, roughly one in seven.

Individuals born in 1990 have a five percent chance of being diagnosed with prostate cancer, or one in 20, the study found.

The news might not be as bad as it sounds, though. The surprising rise in men's risk for prostate cancer is thought to be due to longer life spans and more widespread testing.

The amount of men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer has already shot up in recent years to about 41,000 cases every year, compared with 15,000 just 25 years ago. Three out of every four of those cases are found in men 65-years-old and older.

"The number of men being diagnosed is rising at an alarming rate," Dr Sarah Cant of Prostate Cancer UK said.

"It is more urgent than ever that prostate cancer is higher up the nation's health agenda. Due to a significant legacy of underinvestment, men with prostate cancer are faced with diagnostic tests and treatments decades behind where we need to be."

Longer life spans are in part to blame for the new statistics, as more men are reaching the age when prostate cancer is most likely to develop than ever before, when even 25 years ago, they would have died younger. However, today more men are also being diagnosed at younger age following tests for prostate caner specific antigen; high levels of PSA in the blood are linked to prostate cancer, Daily Mail reported.

The test is also far more widely used than it was in the past, which has also amplified diagnosis rates. Although, the test just tests for prostate cancer in general, and can't distinguish between life-threatening and less aggressive tumors, meaning some men may unnecessarily suffer the side-effects of treatment like impotence and incontinence.

"We're detecting more cases of prostate cancer than ever before," said Professor Malcolm Mason of Cancer Research UK.

"And we're carrying out an intensive amount of research to find better methods than PSA to distinguish between the minority of cases that are life-threatening and need treatment - the vipers - from the majority that don't - the grass snakes. Targeting the tests at men who have a higher risk of developing prostate cancer might be a better approach than screening all men."

On the brighter side, prostate cancer death rates have plummeted in the last 20 years, dropping 18 percent, to about 10,700 deaths from the disease a year. Earlier diagnosis and new drug treatments have helped improve the survival rate, researchers said.

A newer prostate cancer treatment, which prevents male hormones that fuel prostate tumors is also now more widespread and prescribed earlier than it was in the 1990s, noted the Daily Mail.