Diets high in meat may have role in prostate cancer, professor says

• Prostate cancer afflicts a third more American men each year than the number of American women who develop breast cancer, yet it gets considerably less attention.
• According to the Prostate Cancer Foundation, one in six American men will develop the disease.
• It works with leading cancer research centers including M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York to fast-track potential cures for the disease and has funded more than $230 million in research.
• Within the past year, researchers have made progress in identifying biological markers that indicate the presence of the disease and in understanding how the disease spreads from the reproductive gland to bone marrow and blood, said Dr. Christopher Logothetis, professor of genitourinary medical oncology at M.D. Anderson.
• "We can actually find [markers] in the bone marrow.
• Furthermore we know how to measure them in the blood and the bone marrow of patients so they become indices that we use to predict that the cancer will progress," Dr. Logothetis said.
• Last May, the FDA approved the use of the drug docetaxel, marketed as Taxotere, for treating advanced prostate cancer.
• In a study of 1,000 men with advanced prostate cancer, Taxotere, in combination with the steroid prednisone, was found to prolong life by 2 1/2 months over a control group.
• And, while studies continue on a number of other drugs, Dr. Logothetis and other researchers affiliated with the foundation are conducting a large-scale clinical trial of Gleevec.
• Donald Coffey, an oncology and urology professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said genetics is a factor in about 10 percent of prostate cancer cases.
• In 90 percent of the cases, environmental factors, particularly a diet high in meat and fat from meat, are the predominant factor, Coffey said.