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Testosterone therapy may not raise cancer risk

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Men with low testosterone have long been cautioned against taking hormone supplements to improve sexual desire and performance because testosterone feeds some prostate cancers.

But in a new study, researchers found that testosterone treatment didn’t increase the chances that even men with an elevated prostate cancer risk would develop a malignancy.

“These results are not conclusive about the role of testosterone, but it’s very reassuring that a group at high risk of cancer did not appear to have any increased risk when treated for a year with testosterone,” said study author Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, a urological surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

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Morgentaler and urologist Dr. Ernani Luis Rhoden followed 75 men, average age 60, through 12 months of testosterone replacement. Pretreatment biopsies revealed 20 men had a precancerous condition called prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia; 55 had healthy prostates.

Blood measurements of prostate-specific antigen, an indicator of possible malignancy, were similar in both groups before and after treatment, with a slight average increase for everyone. The study was published in the December issue of the journal Urology.

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-- Jane E. Allen

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