Testosterone therapy may not raise cancer risk

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.

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